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of peace, of affluence, and perhaps of content.[1] The daughters of Hilderic were entertained with the respectful tenderness due to their age and misfortune; and Justinian and Theodora accepted the honour of educating and enriching the female descendants of the great Theodosius. The bravest of the Vandal youth were distributed into five squadrons of cavalry, which adopted the name of their benefactor, and supported in the Persian wars the glory of their ancestors. But these rare exceptions, the reward of birth or valour, are insufficient to explain the fate of a nation, whose numbers, before a short and bloodless war, amounted to more than six hundred thousand persons. After the exile of their king and nobles, the servile crowd might purchase their safety by abjuring their character, religion, and language; and their degenerate posterity would be insensibly mingled with the common herd of African subjects. Yet even in the present age, and in the heart of the Moorish tribes, a curious traveller has discovered the white complexion and long flaxen hair of a northern race;[2] and it was formerly believed that the boldest of the Vandals fled beyond the power, or even the knowledge, of the Romans, to enjoy their solitary freedom on the shores of the Atlantic ocean.[3] Africa had been their empire, it became their prison; nor could they entertain an hope, or even a wish, of returning to the banks of the Elbe, where their brethren, of a spirit less adventurous, still wandered in their native forests. It was impossible for cowards to surmount the barriers of unknown seas and hostile Barbarians; it was impossible for brave men to expose their nakedness and defeat before the eyes of their countrymen, to describe the kingdoms which they had lost, and to claim a share of the humble inheritance which, in a happier hour, they had almost unanimously renounced.[4] In the country between the Elbe and the Oder, several populous villages of Lusatia are inhabited by the Vandals:
- ↑ In the Bélisaire of Marmontel, the king and the conqueror of Africa meet, sup, and converse, without recollecting each other. It is surely a fault of that romance, that not only the hero, but all to whom he had been so conspicuously known, appear to have lost their eyes or their memory.
- ↑ Shaw, p. 59. Yet, since Procopius (l. ii. c. 13) speaks of a people of Mount Atlas, as already distinguished by white bodies and yellow hair, the phænomenon (which is likewise visible in the Andes of Peru, Buffon, tom. iii. p. 504) may naturally be ascribed to the elevation of the ground and the temperature of the air.
- ↑ The geographer of Ravenna (l. iii. c. .i. p. 129, 130, 131. Paris, 1688) describes the Mauritania Gaditana (opposite to Cadiz), ubi gens Vandalorum, a Belisario devicta in Africâ, fugit, et nunquam comparuit.
- ↑ A single voice had protested, and Genseric dismissed, without a formal answer, the Vandals of Germany; but those of Africa derided his prudence and affected to despise the poverty of their forests (Procopius, Vandal. l. i. c. 22).
