Note 2-8 — Chapter II

Their first mischievous exsultation into Alsace being invited by the Romans themselves, (or at least by Constantius in his jealousy of Julian,)—with "presents and promises,—the hopes of spoil, and a perpetual grant of all the territories they were able to subdue." Gibbon, chap. xix. (3, 208.) By any other historian than Gibbon, who has really no fixed opinion on any character, or question, but, safe in the general truism that the worst men sometimes do right, and the best often do wrong, praises when he wants to round a sentence, and blames when he cannot otherwise edge one—it might have startled us to be here told of the nation which "deserved, assumed, and maintained the honourable name of freemen," that "these undisciplined robbers treated as their natural enemies all the subjects of the empire who possessed any property which they were desirous of acquiring." The first campaign of Julian, which throws both Franks and Alemanni back across the Rhine, but grants the Salian Franks, under solemn oath, their established territory in the Netherlands, must be traced at another time.