The objects too found in the tombs of Lombardy are, especially as respects articles of copper and glass, far inferior to those of northern Gaul.
Perhaps the most trustworthy measure of the increase of culture is the sense of a common relationship in the nation; so little of it comes to light in the Celtic battles fought on the soil of what is now Lombardy, while it strikingly appears in the struggles against Caesar.

To all appearance the Celtic nation, when Caesar encountered it, had already reached the maximum of the culture allotted to it, and was even now on the decline.

The civilization of the Transalpine Celts in Caesar's time presents, even for us who are but very imperfectly informed regarding it, several aspects that are estimable, and yet more that are interesting; in some respects it is more akin to the modern than to the Hellenic-Roman culture, with its sailing vessels, its knighthood, its ecclesiastical constitution, above all with its attempts, however imperfect, to build the state not on the city, but on the tribe and in a higher degree on the nation.

But just because we here meet the Celtic nation at the culminating point of its development, its lesser degree of moral endowment or, which is the same thing, its lesser capacity of culture, comes more distinctly into view.
It was unable to produce from its own resources either a national art or a national state; it attained at the utmost a national theology and a peculiar type of nobility.

The original simple valour was no more; the military courage based on higher morality and judicious organization, which comes in the train of increased civilization, had only made its appearance in a very stunted form among the knights.