HISTORY OF MARINE ARCHITECTURE.

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dreadful effects of its devastations, were permitted to pass unexplored and unen-slaved, till convenient opportunity, with the fame either of their wealth, or theluxuries with which they abounded, served as a stimulus to ambition, avarice,or epicurism. Some nations there were, however, who preserved their inde-pendance to the last, and either happy in their poverty, held forth no incentives toconquest, or still more fortunate in their situation, bade defiance to it. Thesecountries continued to enjoy their own manners, and their own arts, pure anduncontaminated. They made war with each other, and they concluded peacewhen fatigued with hostilities, without experiencing the dangerous friendship,or the officious interference, of the mistress of the world. Their commercewas contracted: their motives for war, and their arguments for peace, wereplain and unadorned with sophistry, divested of all diplomatic argument or con-troversy, and as simple as the arms with which they fought. With regard tothese nations, the state of Marine Architecture had probably experienced butlittle advancement during the space of thirty centuries, and would, in all hu-man probability, have continued much longer in the same unimproved state,had they not been compelled to mingle much more intimately with othercountries, which were fancifully considered more civilised than themselves,than they had in early times been accustomed to do.

On this ground, all accounts even of the Chinese themselves, of the differentIndian and African nations not tributary to Rome, and the greater part of thenorthern division of Europe, at that time inhabited by nations which wereconsidered, and with some justice, uncivilised and barbarous, is either so inve-loped in doubt, contradiction, and surmise, as to render it better fitted as asubject for romance than of serious history, or is so uninteresting, as to becomenugatory and irrelevant. Nevertheless, some few countries and nations therewere, which, spiritedly breaking through the bounds apparently prescribed tothem bv providence, and the policy of their ancestors, were not afraid to em-ploy in the greatest designs the very humble means which the infantine stateof science and arts amongst them, prevented from appearing in the splendourthey certainly would have done, had the novices been more fully and conve-niently prepared. Among the first of these appear the Saxons, a people de-rived, according to common opinion, from the ancient Cimbri, once the terrorof Rome, when rising into the most flourishing state, and prevented only bvtheir distance from becoming equally formidable, after she had passed thezenith of her power.

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