The history of the Franks becomes, therefore, the history of the Netherlands.

A soil, exhausted by the long culture of Pagan empires, was to lie fallow for a still longer period.

For a century longer, Rome still retains its outward form, but the swarming nations are now in full career.

Wealth brings strength, strength confidence.

Enthusiasm could not supply the place of experience.

A new civilization was not to be improvised by a single mind.

History shows how feeble are barriers of paper.

Thus the whole country was broken into many shreds and patches of sovereignty.

The finger of the atheists' own divinity, Reason, wrote on the wall the appalling judgments that there is no God that the universe is only matter in spontaneous motion and, most grievous word of all, that what men call their souls die with the death of the body, as music dies when the strings are broken.

A good lawyer is a bad Christian.

In Gaul were two orders, the nobility and the priesthood, while the people, says Caesar, were all slaves.

Give us the luxuries of life, and we will dispense with its necessities.

In the tenth century the old Batavian and later Roman forms have faded away.