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scarce any magistrates: yet have they great humanity, a natural softness of disposition, and a very hospitable temper.
They were nearly the same in the time of Tacitus. “The Finns[1],” he says, live in extreme savageness, in squallid poverty: have neither arms, nor steeds, nor houses. Herbs are their food, skins their cloathing, the earth their bed. All their resource is their arrows, which they point with fish-bones, for want of iron. Their women live by hunting, as well as the men[2]. For they every where accompany them, and gain their fhare of the prey. A rude hovel shelters their infants from the inclemencies of the weather, and the beasts of prey. Such is the home to which their young men return; the asylum to which the old retire. This kind of life they think more happy, than the painful toils of agriculture, than the various labours of domestic management, than that circle of hopes and fears, in which men are involved by their attention to the fortune of themselves and others. Equally secure both as to gods and men, the Finns
