28. So that, accurately thought of, the quality of Frankness glances only with the flat side of it into any meaning of 'Libre,' but with all its cutting edge, determinedly, and to all time, it signifies Brave, strong, and honest, above other men.[15] The old woodland race were never in any wolfish sense 'free,' but in a most human sense Frank, outspoken, meaning what they had said, and standing to it, when they had got it out. Quick and clear in word and act, fearless utterly and restless always;--but idly lawless, or weakly lavish, neither in deed nor word. Their frankness, if you read it as a scholar and a Christian, and not like a modern half-bred, half-brained infidel, knowing no tongue of all the world but in the slang of it, is really opposed, not to Servitude,--but to Shyness![16] It is to this day the note of the sweetest and Frenchiest of French character, that it makes simply perfect _Servants_. Unwearied in protective friendship, in meekly dextrous omnificence, in latent tutorship; the lovingly availablest of valets,--the mentally and personally bonniest of bonnes. But in no capacity shy of you! Though you be the Duke or Duchess of Montaltissimo, you will not find them abashed at your altitude. They will speak 'up' to you, when they have a mind.
[Footnote 15: Gibbon touches the facts more closely in a sentence of his 22nd chapter. "The independent warriors of Germany, _who considered truth as the noblest of their virtues_, and freedom as the most valuable of their possessions." He is speaking especially of the Frankish tribe of the Attuarii, against whom the Emperor Julian had to re-fortify the Rhine from Cleves to Basle: but the first letters of the Emperor Jovian, after Julian's death, "delegated the military command of _Gaul_ and Illyrium (what a vast one it was, we shall see hereafter), to Malarich, a _brave and faithful_ officer of the nation of the Franks;" and they remain the loyal allies of Rome in her last struggle with Alaric. Apparently for the sake only of an interesting variety of language,--and at all events without intimation of any causes of so great a change in the national character,--we find Mr. Gibbon in his next volume suddenly adopting the abusive epithets of Procopius, and calling the Franks "a light and perfidious nation" (vii. 251). The only traceable grounds for this unexpected description of them are that they refuse to be bribed either into friendship or activity, by Rome or Ravenna; and that in his invasion of Italy, the grandson of Clovis did not previously send exact warning of his proposed route, nor even entirely signify his intentions till he had secured the bridge of the Po at Pavia; afterwards declaring his mind with sufficient distinctness by "assaulting, almost at the same instant, the hostile camps of the Goths and Romans, who, instead of uniting their arms, fled with equal precipitation."]