initial commit of ebook 3821HEADmain

2 files changed, 9910 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/old/rmtut10.txt b/old/rmtut10.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..e4b84a1
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/rmtut10.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,9910 @@
+Project Gutenberg Etext of Roman and the Teuton, by Charles Kingsley
+#12 in our series by Charles Kingsley
+
+Copyright laws are changing all over the world, be sure to check
+the laws for your country before redistributing these files!!!
+
+Please take a look at the important information in this header.
+We encourage you to keep this file on your own disk, keeping an
+electronic path open for the next readers.
+
+Please do not remove this.
+
+This should be the first thing seen when anyone opens the book.
+Do not change or edit it without written permission.  The words
+are carefully chosen to provide users with the information they
+need about what they can legally do with the texts.
+
+
+**Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts**
+
+**Etexts Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971**
+
+*****These Etexts Are Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers!*****
+
+Information on contacting Project Gutenberg to get Etexts, and
+further information is included below, including for donations.
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a 501(c)(3)
+organization with EIN [Employee Identification Number] 64-6221541
+
+
+
+Title: The Roman and the Teuton
+
+Author: Charles Kingsley
+
+Release Date: March, 2003  [Etext #3821]
+[Yes, we are about one year ahead of schedule]
+[The actual date this file first posted = 09/25/01]
+
+Edition: 10
+
+Language: English
+
+Project Gutenberg Etext The Roman and the Teuton, by Charles Kingsley
+*********This file should be named rmtut10.txt or rmtut10.zip********
+
+Corrected EDITIONS of our etexts get a new NUMBER, rmtut11.txt
+VERSIONS based on separate sources get new LETTER, rmtut10a.txt
+
+This etext was produced by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk,
+from the 1889 Macmillan and Co. edition.
+
+Project Gutenberg Etexts are usually created from multiple editions,
+all of which are in the Public Domain in the United States, unless a
+copyright notice is included.  Therefore, we usually do NOT keep any
+of these books in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+We are now trying to release all our books one year in advance
+of the official release dates, leaving time for better editing.
+Please be encouraged to send us error messages even years after
+the official publication date.
+
+Please note neither this listing nor its contents are final til
+midnight of the last day of the month of any such announcement.
+The official release date of all Project Gutenberg Etexts is at
+Midnight, Central Time, of the last day of the stated month.  A
+preliminary version may often be posted for suggestion, comment
+and editing by those who wish to do so.
+
+Most people start at our sites at:
+http://gutenberg.net
+http://promo.net/pg
+
+
+Those of you who want to download any Etext before announcement
+can surf to them as follows, and just download by date; this is
+also a good way to get them instantly upon announcement, as the
+indexes our cataloguers produce obviously take a while after an
+announcement goes out in the Project Gutenberg Newsletter.
+
+http://www.ibiblio.org/gutenberg/etext03
+or
+ftp://ftp.ibiblio.org/pub/docs/books/gutenberg/etext03
+
+Or /etext02, 01, 00, 99, 98, 97, 96, 95, 94, 93, 92, 92, 91 or 90
+
+Just search by the first five letters of the filename you want,
+as it appears in our Newsletters.
+
+
+Information about Project Gutenberg (one page)
+
+We produce about two million dollars for each hour we work.  The
+time it takes us, a rather conservative estimate, is fifty hours
+to get any etext selected, entered, proofread, edited, copyright
+searched and analyzed, the copyright letters written, etc.  This
+projected audience is one hundred million readers.  If our value
+per text is nominally estimated at one dollar then we produce $2
+million dollars per hour this year as we release fifty new Etext
+files per month, or 500 more Etexts in 2000 for a total of 3000+
+If they reach just 1-2% of the world's population then the total
+should reach over 300 billion Etexts given away by year's end.
+
+The Goal of Project Gutenberg is to Give Away One Trillion Etext
+Files by December 31, 2001.  [10,000 x 100,000,000 = 1 Trillion]
+This is ten thousand titles each to one hundred million readers,
+which is only about 4% of the present number of computer users.
+
+At our revised rates of production, we will reach only one-third
+of that goal by the end of 2001, or about 4,000 Etexts unless we
+manage to get some real funding.
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation has been created
+to secure a future for Project Gutenberg into the next millennium.
+
+We need your donations more than ever!
+
+As of July 12, 2001 contributions are only being solicited from people in:
+Arkansas, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho,
+Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota,
+Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, North
+Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota,
+Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia,
+Wisconsin, and Wyoming.
+
+We have filed in about 45 states now, but these are the only ones
+that have responded.
+
+As the requirements for other states are met,
+additions to this list will be made and fund raising
+will begin in the additional states.  Please feel
+free to ask to check the status of your state.
+
+In answer to various questions we have received on this:
+
+We are constantly working on finishing the paperwork
+to legally request donations in all 50 states.  If
+your state is not listed and you would like to know
+if we have added it since the list you have, just ask.
+
+While we cannot solicit donations from people in
+states where we are not yet registered, we know
+of no prohibition against accepting donations
+from donors in these states who approach us with
+an offer to donate.
+
+
+International donations are accepted,
+but we don't know ANYTHING about how
+to make them tax-deductible, or
+even if they CAN be made deductible,
+and don't have the staff to handle it
+even if there are ways.
+
+All donations should be made to:
+
+Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+PMB 113
+1739 University Ave.
+Oxford, MS 38655-4109
+
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a 501(c)(3)
+organization with EIN [Employee Identification Number] 64-6221541,
+and has been approved as a 501(c)(3) organization by the US Internal
+Revenue Service (IRS).  Donations are tax-deductible to the maximum
+extent permitted by law.  As the requirements for other states are met,
+additions to this list will be made and fund raising will begin in the
+additional states.
+
+We need your donations more than ever!
+
+You can get up to date donation information at:
+
+http://www.gutenberg.net/donation.html
+
+
+***
+
+If you can't reach Project Gutenberg,
+you can always email directly to:
+
+Michael S. Hart <hart@pobox.com>
+
+hart@pobox.com forwards to hart@prairienet.org and archive.org
+if your mail bounces from archive.org, I will still see it, if
+it bounces from prairienet.org, better resend later on. . . .
+
+Prof. Hart will answer or forward your message.
+
+We would prefer to send you information by email.
+
+
+***
+
+
+Example command-line FTP session:
+
+ftp ftp.ibiblio.org
+login: anonymous
+password: your@login
+cd pub/docs/books/gutenberg
+cd etext90 through etext99 or etext00 through etext02, etc.
+dir [to see files]
+get or mget [to get files. . .set bin for zip files]
+GET GUTINDEX.??  [to get a year's listing of books, e.g., GUTINDEX.99]
+GET GUTINDEX.ALL [to get a listing of ALL books]
+
+
+**The Legal Small Print**
+
+
+(Three Pages)
+
+***START**THE SMALL PRINT!**FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN ETEXTS**START***
+Why is this "Small Print!" statement here?  You know: lawyers.
+They tell us you might sue us if there is something wrong with
+your copy of this etext, even if you got it for free from
+someone other than us, and even if what's wrong is not our
+fault.  So, among other things, this "Small Print!" statement
+disclaims most of our liability to you.  It also tells you how
+you may distribute copies of this etext if you want to.
+
+*BEFORE!* YOU USE OR READ THIS ETEXT
+By using or reading any part of this PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm
+etext, you indicate that you understand, agree to and accept
+this "Small Print!" statement.  If you do not, you can receive
+a refund of the money (if any) you paid for this etext by
+sending a request within 30 days of receiving it to the person
+you got it from.  If you received this etext on a physical
+medium (such as a disk), you must return it with your request.
+
+ABOUT PROJECT GUTENBERG-TM ETEXTS
+This PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm etext, like most PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm etexts,
+is a "public domain" work distributed by Professor Michael S. Hart
+through the Project Gutenberg Association (the "Project").
+Among other things, this means that no one owns a United States copyright
+on or for this work, so the Project (and you!) can copy and
+distribute it in the United States without permission and
+without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules, set forth
+below, apply if you wish to copy and distribute this etext
+under the "PROJECT GUTENBERG" trademark.
+
+Please do not use the "PROJECT GUTENBERG" trademark to market
+any commercial products without permission.
+
+To create these etexts, the Project expends considerable
+efforts to identify, transcribe and proofread public domain
+works.  Despite these efforts, the Project's etexts and any
+medium they may be on may contain "Defects".  Among other
+things, Defects may take the form of incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other
+intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged
+disk or other etext medium, a computer virus, or computer
+codes that damage or cannot be read by your equipment.
+
+LIMITED WARRANTY; DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES
+But for the "Right of Replacement or Refund" described below,
+[1] Michael Hart and the Foundation (and any other party you may
+receive this etext from as a PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm etext) disclaims
+all liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including
+legal fees, and [2] YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE OR
+UNDER STRICT LIABILITY, OR FOR BREACH OF WARRANTY OR CONTRACT,
+INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE
+OR INCIDENTAL DAMAGES, EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE
+POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.
+
+If you discover a Defect in this etext within 90 days of
+receiving it, you can receive a refund of the money (if any)
+you paid for it by sending an explanatory note within that
+time to the person you received it from.  If you received it
+on a physical medium, you must return it with your note, and
+such person may choose to alternatively give you a replacement
+copy.  If you received it electronically, such person may
+choose to alternatively give you a second opportunity to
+receive it electronically.
+
+THIS ETEXT IS OTHERWISE PROVIDED TO YOU "AS-IS".  NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, ARE MADE TO YOU AS
+TO THE ETEXT OR ANY MEDIUM IT MAY BE ON, INCLUDING BUT NOT
+LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A
+PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
+
+Some states do not allow disclaimers of implied warranties or
+the exclusion or limitation of consequential damages, so the
+above disclaimers and exclusions may not apply to you, and you
+may have other legal rights.
+
+INDEMNITY
+You will indemnify and hold Michael Hart, the Foundation,
+and its trustees and agents, and any volunteers associated
+with the production and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm
+texts harmless, from all liability, cost and expense, including
+legal fees, that arise directly or indirectly from any of the
+following that you do or cause:  [1] distribution of this etext,
+[2] alteration, modification, or addition to the etext,
+or [3] any Defect.
+
+DISTRIBUTION UNDER "PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm"
+You may distribute copies of this etext electronically, or by
+disk, book or any other medium if you either delete this
+"Small Print!" and all other references to Project Gutenberg,
+or:
+
+[1]  Only give exact copies of it.  Among other things, this
+     requires that you do not remove, alter or modify the
+     etext or this "small print!" statement.  You may however,
+     if you wish, distribute this etext in machine readable
+     binary, compressed, mark-up, or proprietary form,
+     including any form resulting from conversion by word
+     processing or hypertext software, but only so long as
+     *EITHER*:
+
+     [*]  The etext, when displayed, is clearly readable, and
+          does *not* contain characters other than those
+          intended by the author of the work, although tilde
+          (~), asterisk (*) and underline (_) characters may
+          be used to convey punctuation intended by the
+          author, and additional characters may be used to
+          indicate hypertext links; OR
+
+     [*]  The etext may be readily converted by the reader at
+          no expense into plain ASCII, EBCDIC or equivalent
+          form by the program that displays the etext (as is
+          the case, for instance, with most word processors);
+          OR
+
+     [*]  You provide, or agree to also provide on request at
+          no additional cost, fee or expense, a copy of the
+          etext in its original plain ASCII form (or in EBCDIC
+          or other equivalent proprietary form).
+
+[2]  Honor the etext refund and replacement provisions of this
+     "Small Print!" statement.
+
+[3]  Pay a trademark license fee to the Foundation of 20% of the
+     gross profits you derive calculated using the method you
+     already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  If you
+     don't derive profits, no royalty is due.  Royalties are
+     payable to "Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation"
+     the 60 days following each date you prepare (or were
+     legally required to prepare) your annual (or equivalent
+     periodic) tax return.  Please contact us beforehand to
+     let us know your plans and to work out the details.
+
+WHAT IF YOU *WANT* TO SEND MONEY EVEN IF YOU DON'T HAVE TO?
+Project Gutenberg is dedicated to increasing the number of
+public domain and licensed works that can be freely distributed
+in machine readable form.
+
+The Project gratefully accepts contributions of money, time,
+public domain materials, or royalty free copyright licenses.
+Money should be paid to the:
+"Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+If you are interested in contributing scanning equipment or
+software or other items, please contact Michael Hart at:
+hart@pobox.com
+
+[Portions of this header are copyright (C) 2001 by Michael S. Hart
+and may be reprinted only when these Etexts are free of all fees.]
+[Project Gutenberg is a TradeMark and may not be used in any sales
+of Project Gutenberg Etexts or other materials be they hardware or
+software or any other related product without express permission.]
+
+*END THE SMALL PRINT! FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN ETEXTS*Ver.07/27/01*END*
+
+
+
+
+
+
+This etext was produced by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk,
+from the 1889 Macmillan and Co. edition.
+
+
+
+
+
+THE ROMAN AND THE TEUTON
+A SERIES OF LECTURES DELIVERED BEFORE THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE
+BY CHARLES KINGSLEY, M.A.
+
+
+
+
+Contents
+   Preface by Professor F. Max Muller
+   The Forest Children
+   The Dying Empire
+   Preface to Lecture III
+   The Human Deluge
+   The Gothic Civilizer
+   Dietrich's End
+   The Nemesis of the Goths
+   Paulus Diaconus
+   The Clergy and the Heathen
+   The Monk a Civilizer
+   The Lombard Laws
+   The Popes and the Lombards
+   The Strategy of Prividence
+   Appendix--Inaugural Lecture:  The Limits of Exact Science as
+Applied to History
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+
+Never shall I forget the moment when for the last time I gazed upon
+the manly features of Charles Kingsley, features which Death had
+rendered calm, grand, sublime.  The constant struggle that in life
+seemed to allow no rest to his expression, the spirit, like a caged
+lion, shaking the bars of his prison, the mind striving for
+utterance, the soul wearying for loving response,--all that was over.
+There remained only the satisfied expression of triumph and peace, as
+of a soldier who had fought a good fight, and who, while sinking into
+the stillness of the slumber of death, listens to the distant sounds
+of music and to the shouts of victory.  One saw the ideal man, as
+Nature had meant him to be, and one felt that there is no greater
+sculptor than Death.
+
+As one looked on that marble statue which only some weeks ago had so
+warmly pressed one's hand, his whole life flashed through one's
+thoughts.  One remembered the young curate and the Saint's Tragedy;
+the chartist parson and Alton Locke; the happy poet and the Sands of
+Dee; the brilliant novel-writer and Hypatia and Westward-Ho; the
+Rector of Eversley and his Village Sermons; the beloved professor at
+Cambridge, the busy canon at Chester, the powerful preacher in
+Westminster Abbey.  One thought of him by the Berkshire chalk-streams
+and on the Devonshire coast, watching the beauty and wisdom of
+Nature, reading her solemn lessons, chuckling too over her inimitable
+fun.  One saw him in town-alleys, preaching the Gospel of godliness
+and cleanliness, while smoking his pipe with soldiers and navvies.
+One heard him in drawing-rooms, listened to with patient silence,
+till one of his vigorous or quaint speeches bounded forth, never to
+be forgotten.  How children delighted in him!  How young, wild men
+believed in him, and obeyed him too!  How women were captivated by
+his chivalry, older men by his genuine humility and sympathy!
+
+All that was now passing away--was gone.  But as one looked on him
+for the last time on earth, one felt that greater than the curate,
+the poet, the professor, the canon, had been the man himself, with
+his warm heart, his honest purposes, his trust in his friends, his
+readiness to spend himself, his chivalry and humility, worthy of a
+better age.
+
+Of all this the world knew little;--yet few men excited wider and
+stronger sympathies.
+
+Who can forget that funeral on the 28th Jan., 1875, and the large sad
+throng that gathered round his grave?  There was the representative
+of the Prince of Wales, and close by the gipsies of the Eversley
+common, who used to call him their Patrico-rai, their Priest-King.
+There was the old Squire of his village, and the labourers, young and
+old, to whom he had been a friend and a father.  There were Governors
+of distant Colonies, officers, and sailors, the Bishop of his
+diocese, and the Dean of his abbey; there were the leading
+Nonconformists of the neighbourhood, and his own devoted curates,
+Peers and Members of the House of Commons, authors and publishers;
+and outside the church-yard, the horses and the hounds and the
+huntsman in pink, for though as good a clergyman as any, Charles
+Kingsley had been a good sportsman too, and had taken in his life
+many a fence as bravely as he took the last fence of all, without
+fear or trembling.  All that he had loved, and all that had loved him
+was there, and few eyes were dry when he was laid in his own yellow
+gravel bed, the old trees which he had planted and cared for waving
+their branches to him for the last time, and the grey sunny sky
+looking down with calm pity on the deserted rectory, and on the short
+joys and the shorter sufferings of mortal men.
+
+All went home feeling that life was poorer, and every one knew that
+he had lost a friend who had been, in some peculiar sense, his own.
+Charles Kingsley will be missed in England, in the English colonies,
+in America, where he spent his last happy year; aye, wherever Saxon
+speech and Saxon thought is understood.  He will be mourned for,
+yearned for, in every place in which he passed some days of his busy
+life.  As to myself, I feel as if another cable had snapped that tied
+me to this hospitable shore.
+
+When an author or a poet dies, the better part of him, it is often
+said, is left in his works.  So it is in many cases.  But with
+Kingsley his life and his works were one.  All he wrote was meant for
+the day when he wrote it.  That was enough for him.  He hardly gave
+himself time to think of fame and the future.  Compared with a good
+work done, with a good word spoken, with a silent grasp of the hand
+from a young man he had saved from mischief, or with a 'Thank you,
+Sir,' from a poor woman to whom he had been a comfort, he would have
+despised what people call glory, like incense curling away in smoke.
+He was, in one sense of the word, a careless writer.  He did his best
+at the time and for the time.  He did it with a concentrated energy
+of will which broke through all difficulties.  In his flights of
+imagination, in the light and fire of his language he had few equals,
+if any; but the perfection and classical finish which can be obtained
+by a sustained effort only, and by a patience which shrinks from no
+drudgery, these are wanting in most of his works.
+
+However, fame, for which he cared so little, has come to him.  His
+bust will stand in Westminster Abbey, in the Chapel of St. John the
+Baptist, by the side of his friend, Frederick Maurice; and in the
+Temple of Fame which will be consecrated to the period of Victoria
+and Albert, there will be a niche for Charles Kingsley, the author of
+Alton Locke and Hypatia.
+
+Sooner or later a complete edition of his works will be wanted,
+though we may doubt whether he himself would have wished all his
+literary works to be preserved.  From what I knew of him and his
+marvellous modesty, I should say decidedly not.  I doubt more
+especially, whether he would have wished the present book, The Roman
+and the Teuton, to be handed down to posterity.  None of his books
+was so severely criticised as this volume of Lectures, delivered
+before the University of Cambridge, and published in 1864.  He
+himself did not republish it, and it seems impossible to speak in
+more depreciatory terms of his own historical studies than he does
+himself again and again in the course of his lectures.  Yet these
+lectures, it should be remembered, were more largely attended than
+almost any other lectures at Cambridge.  They produced a permanent
+impression on many a young mind.  They are asked for again and again,
+and when the publishers wished for my advice as to the expediency of
+bringing out a new and cheaper edition, I could not hesitate as to
+what answer to give.
+
+I am not so blinded by my friendship for Kingsley as to say that
+these lectures are throughout what academical lectures ought to be.
+I only wish some one would tell me what academical lectures at Oxford
+and Cambridge can be, as long as the present system of teaching and
+examining is maintained.  It is easy to say what these lectures are
+not.  They do not profess to contain the results of long continued
+original research.  They are not based on a critical appreciation of
+the authorities which had to be consulted.  They are not well
+arranged, systematic or complete.  All this the suddenly elected
+professor of history at Cambridge would have been the first to grant.
+'I am not here,' he says, 'to teach you history.  I am here to teach
+you how to teach yourselves history.'  I must say even more.  It
+seems to me that these lectures were not always written in a
+perfectly impartial and judicial spirit, and that occasionally they
+are unjust to the historians who, from no other motive but a sincere
+regard for truth, thought it their duty to withhold their assent from
+many of the commonly received statements of mediaeval chroniclers.
+
+But for all that, let us see what these Lectures are, and whether
+there is not room for them by the side of other works.  First of all,
+according to the unanimous testimony of those who heard them
+delivered at Cambridge, they stirred up the interest of young men,
+and made them ask for books which Undergraduates had never asked for
+before at the University libraries.  They made many people who read
+them afterwards, take a new interest in old and half-forgotten kings
+and battles, and they extorted even from unfriendly critics the
+admission that certain chapters, such as, for instance, 'The Monk as
+a Civiliser,' displayed in an unexpected way his power of
+appreciating the good points in characters, otherwise most antipathic
+to the apostle of Manly Christianity.  They contain, in fact, the
+thoughts of a poet, a moralist, a politician, a theologian, and,
+before all, of a friend and counsellor of young men, while reading
+for them and with them one of the most awful periods in the history
+of mankind, the agonies of a dying Empire and the birth of new
+nationalities.  History was but his text, his chief aim was that of
+the teacher and preacher, and as an eloquent interpreter of the
+purposes of history before an audience of young men to whom history
+is but too often a mere succession of events to be learnt by heart,
+and to be ready against periodical examinations, he achieved what he
+wished to achieve.  Historians by profession would naturally be
+incensed at some portions of this book, but even they would probably
+admit by this time, that there are in it whole chapters full of
+excellence, telling passages, happy delineations, shrewd remarks,
+powerful outbreaks of real eloquence, which could not possibly be
+consigned to oblivion.
+
+Nor would it have been possible to attempt to introduce any
+alterations, or to correct what may seem to be mistakes.  The book is
+not meant as a text-book or as an authority, any more than Schiller's
+History of the Thirty Years' War; it should be read in future, as
+what it was meant to be from the first, Kingsley's thoughts on some
+of the moral problems presented by the conflict between the Roman and
+the Teuton.  One cannot help wishing that, instead of lectures,
+Kingsley had given us another novel, like Hypatia, or a real
+historical tragedy, a Dietrich von Bern, embodying in living
+characters one of the fiercest struggles of humanity, the death of
+the Roman, the birth of the German world.  Let me quote here what
+Bunsen said of Kingsley's dramatic power many years ago:
+
+'I do not hesitate (he writes) to call these two works, the Saint's
+Tragedy and Hypatia, by far the most important and perfect of this
+genial writer.  In these more particularly I find the justification
+of a hope which I beg to be allowed to express--that Kingsley might
+continue Shakspeare's historical plays.  I have for several years
+made no secret of it, that Kingsley seems to me the genius of our
+century, called to place by the side of that sublime dramatic series
+from King John to Henry VIII, another series of equal rank, from
+Edward VI to the Landing of William of Orange.  This is the only
+historical development of Europe which unites in itself all vital
+elements, and which we might look upon without overpowering pain.
+The tragedy of St. Elizabeth shows that Kingsley can grapple, not
+only with the novel, but with the more severe rules of dramatic art.
+And Hypatia proves, on the largest scale, that he can discover in the
+picture of the historical past, the truly human, the deep, the
+permanent, and that he knows how to represent it.  How, with all
+this, he can hit the fresh tone of popular life, and draw humourous
+characters and complications with Shakspearian energy, is proved by
+all his works.  And why should he not undertake this great task?
+There is a time when the true poet, the prophet of the present, must
+bid farewell to the questions of the day, which seem so great because
+they are so near, but are, in truth, but small and unpoetical.  He
+must say to himself, "Let the dead bury their dead"--and the time has
+come that Kingsley should do so.'
+
+A great deal has been written on mistakes which Kingsley was supposed
+to have made in these Lectures, but I doubt whether these criticisms
+were always perfectly judicial and fair.  For instance, Kingsley's
+using the name of Dietrich, instead of Theodoric, was represented as
+the very gem of a blunder, and some critics went so far as to hint
+that he had taken Theodoric for a Greek word, as an adjective of
+Theodorus.  This, of course, was only meant as a joke, for on page
+120 Kingsley had said, in a note, that the name of Theodoric,
+Theuderic, Dietrich, signifies 'king of nations.'  He therefore knew
+perfectly well that Theodoric was simply a Greek adaptation of the
+Gothic name Theode-reiks, theod meaning people, reiks, according to
+Grimm, princeps {p1}.  But even if he had called the king Theodorus,
+the mistake would not have been unpardonable, for he might have
+appealed to the authority of Gregory of Tours, who uses not only
+Theodoricus, but also Theodorus, as the same name.
+
+A more serious charge, however, was brought against him for having
+used the High-German form Dietrich, instead of the original form
+Theodereiks or Theoderic, or even Theodoric.  Should I have altered
+this?  I believe not; for it is clear to me that Kingsley had his
+good reasons for preferring Dietrich to Theodoric.
+
+He introduces him first to his hearers as 'Theodoric, known in German
+song as Dietrich of Bern.'  He had spoken before of the Visi-Gothic
+Theodoric, and of him he never speaks as Dietrich.  Then, why should
+he have adopted this High-German name for the great Theodoric, and
+why should he speak of Attila too as Etzel?
+
+One of the greatest of German historians, Johannes von Muller, does
+the same.  He always calls Theodoric, Dietrich of Bern; and though he
+gives no reasons for it, his reasons can easily be guessed.  Soon
+after Theodoric's death, the influence of the German legends on
+history, and of history on the German legends, became so great that
+it was impossible for a time to disentangle two characters,
+originally totally distinct, viz. Thjodrekr of the Edda, the Dietrich
+of the German poetry on one side, and the King of the Goths,
+Theodoric, on the other.  What had long been said and sung about
+Thjodrekr and Dietrich was believed to have happened to King
+Theodoric, while at the same time historical and local elements in
+the life of Theodoric, residing at Verona, were absorbed by the
+legends of Thjodrekr and Dietrich.  The names of the legendary hero
+and the historical king were probably identical, though even that is
+not quite certain {p2}; but at all events, after Theodoric's death,
+all the numerous dialectic varieties of the name, whether in High or
+in Low-German, were understood by the people at large, both of the
+hero and of the king.
+
+Few names have had a larger number of alias'.  They have been
+carefully collected by Graff, Grimm, Forstemann, Pott, and others.  I
+here give the principal varieties of this name, as actually occurring
+in MSS., and arranged according to the changes of the principal
+consonants:-
+
+(1)  With Th-d:  Theudoricus, Theudericus, [Greek text which cannot
+be reproduced], Thiodiricus, Thiodericus, Thiodric, Thiodricus,
+Thiodrih, Theodoricus, Theodericus, Theoderic, Theodrich, Thiadric,
+Thiadrich, Thiedorik, Thiederic, Thiederik, Thiederich, Thiedorich,
+Thiedric, Thiedrich, Thideric, Thiederich, Thidrich, Thodericus,
+Thiaedric, Thieoderich, Thederich, Thedric.
+
+(2)  With T-d Teudericus, Teudricus, Tiodericus, Teodoricus,
+Teodericus, Teodric, Teodrich, Tiadric, Tiedrik, Tiedrich, Tiedric,
+Tidericus, Tiderich, Tederich.
+
+(3)  With D-d:  [Greek text], Diodericus, Deoderich, Deodrich,
+Diederich, Diderich.
+
+(4)  With Th-t:  Thiotiricus, Thiotirih, Thiotiricus, Thiotrih,
+Theotoricus, Theotericus, Theoterih, Theotrih, Theotrich, Thiatric,
+Thieterich, Thietrih, Thietrich, Theatrih.
+
+(5)  With T-t:  Teutrich, Teoterih, Teotrich, Teotrih, Tieterich,
+Teatrih, Tiheiterich.
+
+(6)  With D-t:  Dioterih, Diotericus, Diotricus, Deotrich, Deotrih,
+Dieterih, Dieterich, Dietrich, Diterih, Ditricus.
+
+(7)  With Th-th:  Theotherich, Theothirich.
+
+(8)  With T-th:  deest.
+
+(9)  With D-th:  Dietherich.
+
+It is quite true that, strictly speaking, the forms with Th-d, are
+Low-German, and those with D-t, High-German, but before we trust
+ourselves to this division for historical purposes, we must remember
+three facts:  (1) that Proper Names frequently defy Grimm's Law; (2)
+that in High-German MSS. much depends on the locality in which they
+are written; (3) that High-German is not in the strict sense of the
+word a corruption of Low-German, and, at all events, not, as Grimm
+supposed, chronologically posterior to Low-German, but that the two
+are parallel dialects, like Doric and Aeolic, the Low-German being
+represented by the earliest literary documents, Gothic and Saxon, the
+High-German asserting its literary presence later, not much before
+the eighth century, but afterwards maintaining its literary and
+political supremacy from the time of Charlemagne to the present day.
+
+When Theodoric married Odeflede, the daughter of Childebert, and a
+sister of Chlodwig, I have little doubt that, at the court of
+Chlodwig or Clovis, his royal brother-in-law was spoken of in
+conversation as Dioterih, although in official documents, and in the
+history of Gregory of Tours, he appears under his classical name of
+Theodoricus, in Jornandes Theodericus.  Those who, with Grimm {p3},
+admit a transition of Low into High-German, and deny that the change
+of Gothic Th into High-German D took place before the sixth or
+seventh century, will find it difficult to account, in the first
+century, for the name of Deudorix, a German captive, the nephew of
+Melo the Sigambrian, mentioned by Strabo {p4}.  In the oldest German
+poem in which the name of Dietrich occurs, the song of Hildebrand and
+Hadebrand, written down in the beginning of the ninth century {p5},
+we find both forms, the Low-German Theotrih, and the High-German
+Deotrih, used side by side.
+
+Very soon, however, when High-German became the more prevalent
+language in Germany, German historians knew both of the old legendary
+hero and of the Ost-gothic king, by one and the same name, the High-
+German Dietrich.
+
+If therefore Johannes von Muller spoke of Theodoric of Verona as
+Dietrich von Bern, he simply intended to carry on the historical
+tradition.  He meant to remind his readers of the popular name which
+they all knew, and to tell them,--This Dietrich with whom you are all
+acquainted from your childhood, this Dietrich of whom so much is said
+and sung in your legendary stories and poems, the famous Dietrich of
+Bern, this is really the Theoderic, the first German who ruled Italy
+for thirty-three years, more gloriously than any Roman Emperor before
+or after.  I see no harm in this, as long as it is done on purpose,
+and as long as the purpose which Johannes von Muller had in his mind,
+was attained.
+
+No doubt the best plan for an historian to follow is to call every
+man by the name by which he called himself.  Theodoric, we know,
+could not write, but he had a gold plate {p6} made in which the first
+four letters of his name were incised, and when it was fixed on the
+paper, the King drew his pen through the intervals.  Those four
+letters were [Greek text which cannot be reproduced], and though we
+should expect that, as a Goth, he would have spelt his name
+Thiudereik, yet we have no right to doubt, that the vowels were eo,
+and not iu.  But again and again historians spell proper names, not
+as they were written by the people themselves, but as they appear in
+the historical documents through which they became chiefly known.  We
+speak of Plato, because we have Roman literature between us and
+Greece.  American names are accepted in history through a Spanish,
+Indian names through an English medium.  The strictly Old High-German
+form of Carolus Magnus would be Charal, A. S. Carl; yet even in the
+Oaths of Strassburg (842) the name appears as Karlus and as Karl, and
+has remained so ever since {p7}.  In the same document we find Ludher
+for Lothar, Ludhuwig and Lodhuvig for Ludovicus, the oldest form
+being Chlodowich:  and who would lay down the law, which of these
+forms shall be used for historical purposes?
+
+I have little doubt that Kingsley's object in retaining the name
+Dietrich for the Ost-gothic king was much the same as Johannes von
+Muller's.  You know, he meant to say, of Dietrich of Bern, of all the
+wonderful things told of him in the Nibelunge and other German poems.
+Well, that is the Dietrich of the German people, that is what the
+Germans themselves have made of him, by transferring to their great
+Gothic king some of the most incredible achievements of one of their
+oldest legendary heroes.  They have changed even his name, and as the
+children in the schools of Germany {p8} still speak of him as their
+Dietrich von Bern, let him be to us too Dietrich, not simply the Ost-
+gothic Theoderic, but the German Dietrich.
+
+I confess I see no harm in that, though a few words on the strange
+mixture of legend and history might have been useful, because the
+case of Theodoric is one of the most luculent testimonies for that
+blending of fact and fancy in strictly historical times which people
+find it so difficult to believe, but which offers the key, and the
+only true key, for many of the most perplexing problems, both of
+history and of mythology.
+
+Originally nothing could be more different than the Dietrich of the
+old legend and the Dietrich of history.  The former is followed by
+misfortune through the whole of his life.  He is oppressed in his
+youth by his uncle, the famous Ermanrich {p9}; he has to spend the
+greater part of his life (thirty years) in exile, and only returns to
+his kingdom after the death of his enemy.  Yet whenever he is called
+Dietrich of Bern, it is because the real Theodoric, the most
+successful of Gothic conquerors, ruled at Verona.  When his enemy was
+called Otacher, instead of Sibich, it is because the real Theodoric
+conquered the real Odoacer.  When the king, at whose court he passes
+his years of exile, is called Etzel, it is because many German heroes
+had really taken refuge in the camp of Attila.  That Attila died two
+years before Theodoric of Verona was born, is no difficulty to a
+popular poet, nor even the still more glaring contradiction between
+the daring and ferocious character of the real Attila and the
+cowardice of his namesake Etzel, as represented in the poem of the
+Nibelunge.  Thus was legend quickened by history.
+
+On the other hand, if historians, such as Gregory I (Dial. iv. 36)
+{p10}, tell us that an Italian hermit had been witness in a vision to
+the damnation of Theodoric, whose soul was plunged, by the ministers
+of divine vengeance, into the volcano of Lipari, one of the flaming
+mouths of the infernal world, we may recognise in the heated
+imagination of the orthodox monk some recollection of the mysterious
+end of the legendary Dietrich {p11}.  Later on, the legendary and the
+real hero were so firmly welded together that, as early as the
+twelfth century, chroniclers are at their wits' end how to reconcile
+facts and dates.
+
+Ekkehard, in his Chronicon Universale {p12}, which ends 1126 A.D.,
+points out the chronological contradiction between Jornandes, who
+places the death of Ermanrich long before Attila, and the popular
+story which makes him and Dietrich, the son of Dietmar, his
+contemporaries.
+
+Otto von Freising {p13}, in the first half of the twelfth century,
+expresses the same perplexity when he finds that Theodoric is made a
+contemporary of Hermanricus and Attila, though it is certain that
+Attila ruled long after Hermanric, and that, after the death of
+Attila, Theodoric, when eight years old, was given by his father as a
+hostage to the emperor Leo.
+
+Gottfried von Viterbo {p14}, in the second half of the twelfth
+century, expresses his difficulties in similar words.
+
+All these chroniclers who handed down the historical traditions of
+Germany were High-Germans, and thus it has happened that in Germany
+Theodoric the Great became Dietrich, as Strataburgum became
+Strassburg, or Turicum, Zurich.  Whether because English belongs to
+the Low German branch, it is less permissible to an English historian
+than to a German to adopt these High-German names, I cannot say:  all
+I wished to point out was that there was a very intelligible reason
+why Kingsley should have preferred the popular and poetical name of
+Dietrich, even though it was High-German, either to his real Gothic
+name, Theodereik, or to its classical metamorphosis, Theodoricus or
+Theodorus.
+
+Some other mistakes, too, which have been pointed out, did not seem
+to me so serious as to justify their correction in a posthumous
+edition.  It was said, for instance, that Kingsley ought not to have
+called Odoacer and Theodoric, Kings of Italy, as they were only
+lieutenants of the Eastern Caesar.  Cassiodorus, however, tells us
+that Odoacer assumed the name of king (nomen regis Odoacer
+assumpsit), and though Gibbon points out that this may only mean that
+he assumed the abstract title of a king, without applying it to any
+particular nation or country, yet that great historian himself calls
+Odoacer, King of Italy, and shows how he was determined to abolish
+the useless and expensive office of vicegerent of the emperor.
+Kingsley guesses very ingeniously, that Odoacer's assumed title, King
+of nations, may have been the Gothic Theode-reiks, the very name of
+Theodoric.  As to Theodoric himself, Kingsley surely knew his real
+status, for he says:  'Why did he not set himself up as Caesar of
+Rome?  Why did he always consider himself as son-in-arms, and quasi-
+vassal of the Caesar of Constantinople?'
+
+Lastly, in speaking of the extinction of the Western Empire with
+Romulus Augustulus, Kingsley again simply followed the lead of Gibbon
+and other historians; nor can it be said that the expression is not
+perfectly legitimate, however clearly modern research may have shown
+that the Roman Empire, though dead, lived.
+
+So much in defence, or at all events, in explanation, of expressions
+and statements which have been pointed out as most glaring mistakes
+in Kingsley's lectures.  I think it must be clear that in all these
+cases alterations would have been impossible.  There were other
+passages, where I should gladly have altered or struck out whole
+lines, particularly in the ethnological passages, and in the
+attempted etymologies of German proper names.  Neither the one nor
+the other, I believe, are Kingsley's own, though I have tried in vain
+to find out whence he could possibly have taken them.
+
+These, however, are minor matters which are mentioned chiefly in
+order to guard against the impression that, because I left them
+unchanged, I approved of them.  The permanent interest attaching to
+these lectures does not spring from the facts which they give.  For
+these, students will refer to Gibbon.  They will be valued chiefly
+for the thoughts which they contain, for the imagination and
+eloquence which they display, and last, not least, for the sake of
+the man, a man, it is true, of a warm heart rather than of a cold
+judgment, but a man whom, for that very reason, many admired, many
+loved, and many will miss, almost every day of their life.
+
+M. M.
+
+
+
+LECTURE 1--THE FOREST CHILDREN.
+
+
+
+I wish in this first lecture to give you some general conception of
+the causes which urged our Teutonic race to attack and destroy Rome.
+I shall take for this one lecture no special text-book:  but suppose
+you all to be acquainted with the Germania of Tacitus, and with the
+9th Chapter of Gibbon.  And I shall begin, if you will allow me, by a
+parable, a myth, a saga, such as the men of whom I am going to tell
+you loved; and if it seem to any of you childish, bear in mind that
+what is childish need not therefore be shallow.  I know that it is
+not history.  These lectures will not be, in the popular sense,
+history at all.  But I beg you to bear in mind that I am not here to
+teach you history.  No man can do that.  I am here to teach you how
+to teach yourselves history.  I will give you the scaffolding as well
+as I can; you must build the house.
+
+Fancy to yourself a great Troll-garden, such as our forefathers
+dreamed of often fifteen hundred years ago;--a fairy palace, with a
+fairy garden; and all around the primaeval wood.  Inside the Trolls
+dwell, cunning and wicked, watching their fairy treasures, working at
+their magic forges, making and making always things rare and strange;
+and outside, the forest is full of children; such children as the
+world had never seen before, but children still:  children in
+frankness, and purity, and affectionateness, and tenderness of
+conscience, and devout awe of the unseen; and children too in fancy,
+and silliness, and ignorance, and caprice, and jealousy, and
+quarrelsomeness, and love of excitement and adventure, and the mere
+sport of overflowing animal health.  They play unharmed among the
+forest beasts, and conquer them in their play; but the forest is too
+dull and too poor for them; and they wander to the walls of the
+Troll-garden, and wonder what is inside.  One can conceive easily for
+oneself what from that moment would begin to happen.  Some of the
+more adventurous clamber in.  Some, too, the Trolls steal and carry
+off into their palace.  Most never return:  but here and there one
+escapes out again, and tells how the Trolls killed all his comrades:
+but tells too, of the wonders he has seen inside, of shoes of
+swiftness, and swords of sharpness, and caps of darkness; of charmed
+harps, charmed jewels, and above all of the charmed wine:  and after
+all, the Trolls were very kind to him--see what fine clothes they
+have given him--and he struts about awhile among his companions; and
+then returns, and not alone.  The Trolls have bewitched him, as they
+will bewitch more.  So the fame of the Troll-garden spreads; and more
+and more steal in, boys and maidens, and tempt their comrades over
+the wall, and tell of the jewels, and the dresses, and the wine, the
+joyous maddening wine, which equals men with gods; and forget to tell
+how the Trolls have bought them, soul as well as body, and taught
+them to be vain, and lustful, and slavish; and tempted them, too
+often, to sins which have no name.
+
+But their better nature flashes out at times.  They will not be the
+slaves and brutes in human form, which the evil Trolls would have
+them; and they rebel, and escape, and tell of the horrors of that
+fair foul place.  And then arises a noble indignation, and war
+between the Trolls and the forest-children.  But still the Trolls can
+tempt and bribe the greedier or the more vain; and still the wonders
+inside haunt their minds; till it becomes a fixed idea among them
+all, to conquer the garden for themselves and bedizen themselves in
+the fine clothes, and drink their fill of the wine.  Again and again
+they break in:  but the Trolls drive them out, rebuild their walls,
+keep off those outside by those whom they hold enslaved within; till
+the boys grow to be youths, and the youths men:  and still the Troll-
+garden is not conquered, and still it shall be.  And the Trolls have
+grown old and weak, and their walls are crumbling away.  Perhaps they
+may succeed this time--perhaps next.
+
+And at last they do succeed--the fairy walls are breached, the fairy
+palace stormed--and the Trolls are crouching at their feet, and now
+all will be theirs, gold, jewels, dresses, arms, all that the Troll
+possesses--except his cunning.
+
+For as each struggles into the charmed ground, the spell of the place
+falls on him.  He drinks the wine, and it maddens him.  He fills his
+arms with precious trumpery, and another snatches it from his grasp.
+Each envies the youth before him, each cries--Why had I not the luck
+to enter first?  And the Trolls set them against each other, and
+split them into parties, each mad with excitement, and jealousy, and
+wine, till, they scarce know how, each falls upon his fellow, and all
+upon those who are crowding in from the forest, and they fight and
+fight, up and down the palace halls, till their triumph has become a
+very feast of the Lapithae, and the Trolls look on, and laugh a
+wicked laugh, as they tar them on to the unnatural fight, till the
+gardens are all trampled, the finery torn, the halls dismantled, and
+each pavement slippery with brothers' blood.  And then, when the wine
+is gone out of them, the survivors come to their senses, and stare
+shamefully and sadly round.  What an ugly, desolate, tottering ruin
+the fairy palace has become!  Have they spoilt it themselves? or have
+the Trolls bewitched it?  And all the fairy treasure--what has become
+of it? no man knows.  Have they thrown it away in their quarrel? have
+the cunningest hidden it? have the Trolls flown away with it, to the
+fairy land beyond the Eastern mountains? who can tell?  Nothing is
+left but recrimination and remorse.  And they wander back again into
+the forest, away from the doleful ruin, carrion-strewn, to sulk each
+apart over some petty spoil which he has saved from the general
+wreck, hating and dreading each the sound of his neighbour's
+footstep.
+
+What will become of the forest children, unless some kind saint or
+hermit comes among them, to bind them in the holy bonds of
+brotherhood and law?
+
+This is my saga, gentlemen; and it is a true one withal.  For it is
+neither more nor less than the story of the Teutonic tribes, and how
+they overthrew the Empire of Rome.
+
+Menzel, who though he may not rank very high as a historian, has at
+least a true German heart, opens his history with a striking passage.
+
+'The sages of the East were teaching wisdom beneath the palms; the
+merchants of Tyre and Carthage were weighing their heavy anchors, and
+spreading their purple sails for far seas; the Greek was making the
+earth fair by his art, and the Roman founding his colossal empire of
+force, while the Teuton sat, yet a child, unknown and naked among the
+forest beasts:  and yet unharmed and in his sport he lorded it over
+them; for the child was of a royal race, and destined to win glory
+for all time to come.'
+
+To the strange and complicated education which God appointed for this
+race; and by which he has fitted it to become, at least for many
+centuries henceforth, the ruling race of the world, I wish to call
+your attention in my future lectures.  To-day, I wish to impress
+strongly on your minds this childishness of our forefathers.  For
+good or for evil they were great boys; very noble boys; very often
+very naughty boys--as boys with the strength of men might well be.
+Try to conceive such to yourselves, and you have the old Markman,
+Allman, Goth, Lombard, Saxon, Frank.  And the notion may be more than
+a mere metaphor.  Races, like individuals, it has been often said,
+may have their childhood, their youth, their manhood, their old age,
+and natural death.  It is but a theory--perhaps nothing more.  But at
+least, our race had its childhood.  Their virtues, and their sad
+failings, and failures, I can understand on no other theory.  The
+nearest type which we can see now is I fancy, the English sailor, or
+the English navvy.  A great, simple, honest, baby--full of power and
+fun, very coarse and plain spoken at times:  but if treated like a
+human being, most affectionate, susceptible, even sentimental and
+superstitious; fond of gambling, brute excitement, childish
+amusements in the intervals of enormous exertion; quarrelsome among
+themselves, as boys are, and with a spirit of wild independence which
+seems to be strength; but which, till it be disciplined into loyal
+obedience and self-sacrifice, is mere weakness; and beneath all a
+deep practical shrewdness, an indomitable perseverance, when once
+roused by need.  Such a spirit as we see to this day in the English
+sailor--that is the nearest analogue I can find now.  One gets hints
+here and there of what manner of men they were, from the evil day,
+when, one hundred and two years before Christ, the Kempers and
+Teutons, ranging over the Alps toward Italy, 300,000 armed men and
+15,000 mailed knights with broad sword and lances, and in their
+helmets the same bulls'-horns, wings, and feathers, which one sees
+now in the crests of German princes, stumbled upon Marius and his
+Romans, and were destroyed utterly, first the men, then the women,
+who like true women as they were, rather than give up their honour to
+the Romans, hung themselves on the horns of the waggon-oxen, and were
+trampled to death beneath their feet; and then the very dogs, who
+fought on when men and women were all slain--from that fatal day,
+down to the glorious one, when, five hundred years after, Alaric
+stood beneath the walls of Rome, and to their despairing boast of the
+Roman numbers, answered, 'Come out to us then, the thicker the hay,
+the easier mowed,'--for five hundred years, I say, the hints of their
+character are all those of a boy-nature.
+
+They were cruel at times:  but so are boys--much more cruel than
+grown men, I hardly know why--perhaps because they have not felt
+suffering so much themselves, and know not how hard it is to bear.
+There were varieties of character among them.  The Franks were always
+false, vain, capricious, selfish, taking part with the Romans
+whenever their interest or vanity was at stake--the worst of all
+Teutons, though by no means the weakest--and a miserable business
+they made of it in France, for some five hundred years.  The Goths,
+Salvian says, were the most ignavi of all of them; great lazy
+lourdans; apt to be cruel, too, the Visigoths at least, as their
+Spanish descendants proved to the horror of the world:  but men of
+honour withal, as those old Spaniards were.  The Saxons were famed
+for cruelty--I know not why, for our branch of the Saxons has been,
+from the beginning of history, the least cruel people in Europe; but
+they had the reputation--as the Vandals had also--of being the most
+pure; Castitate venerandi.  And among the uncivilized people coldness
+and cruelty go often together.  The less passionate and sensitive the
+nature, the less open to pity.  The Caribs of the West Indies were
+famed for both, in contrast to the profligate and gentle inhabitants
+of Cuba and Hispaniola; and in double contrast to the Red Indian
+tribes of North America, who combined, from our first acquaintance
+with them, the two vices of cruelty and profligacy, to an extent
+which has done more to extirpate them than all the fire-water of the
+white man.
+
+But we must be careful how we compare our forefathers with these, or
+any other savages.  Those who, like Gibbon, have tried to draw a
+parallel between the Red Indian and the Primaeval Teuton, have done
+so at the expense of facts.  First, they have overlooked the broad
+fact, that while the Red Indians have been, ever since we have known
+them, a decreasing race, the Teutons have been a rapidly increasing
+one; in spite of war, and famine, and all the ills of a precarious
+forest life, proving their youthful strength and vitality by a
+reproduction unparalleled, as far as I know, in history, save perhaps
+by that noble and young race, the Russian.  These writers have not
+known that the Teuton had his definite laws, more simple, doubtless,
+in the time of Tacitus than in that of Justinian, but still founded
+on abstract principles so deep and broad that they form the
+groundwork of our English laws and constitution; that the Teuton
+creed concerning the unseen world, and divine beings, was of a
+loftiness and purity as far above the silly legends of Hiawatha as
+the Teuton morals were above those of a Sioux or a Comanche.  Let any
+one read honest accounts of the Red Indians; let him read Catlin,
+James, Lewis and Clarke, Shoolbred; and first and best of all, the
+old 'Travaile in Virginia,' published by the Hakluyt Society:  and
+then let him read the Germania of Tacitus, and judge for himself.
+For my part, I believe that if Gibbon was right, and if our
+forefathers in the German forests had been like Powhattan's people as
+we found them in the Virginian forests, the Romans would not have
+been long in civilizing us off the face of the earth.
+
+No.  All the notes which Tacitus gives us are notes of a young and
+strong race; unconscious of its own capabilities, but possessing such
+capabilities that the observant Romans saw at once with dread and awe
+that they were face to face with such a people as they had never met
+before; that in their hands, sooner or later, might be the fate of
+Rome.  Mad Caracalla, aping the Teuton dress and hair, listening in
+dread to the songs of the Allman Alrunas, telling the Teutons that
+they ought to come over the Rhine and destroy the empire, and then,
+murdering the interpreters, lest they should repeat his words, was
+but babbling out in an insane shape the thought which was brooding in
+the most far-seeing Roman minds.  He felt that they could have done
+the deed; and he felt rightly, madman as he was.  They could have
+done it then, if physical power and courage were all that was needed,
+in the days of the Allman war.  They could have done it a few years
+before, when the Markmen fought Marcus Aurelius Antoninus; on the day
+when the Caesar, at the advice of his augurs, sent two lions to swim
+across the Danube as a test of victory; and the simple Markmen took
+them for big dogs, and killed them with their clubs.  From that day,
+indeed, the Teutons began to conquer slowly, but surely.  Though
+Antoninus beat the Markmen on the Danube, and recovered 100,000 Roman
+prisoners, yet it was only by the help of the Vandals; from that day
+the empire was doomed, and the Teutons only kept at bay by bribing
+one tribe to fight another, or by enlisting their more adventurous
+spirits into the Roman legions, to fight against men of their own
+blood;--a short-sighted and suicidal policy; for by that very method
+they were teaching the Teuton all he needed, the discipline and the
+military science of the Roman.
+
+But the Teutons might have done it a hundred years before that, when
+Rome was in a death agony, and Vitellius and Vespasian were
+struggling for the purple, and Civilis and the fair Velleda, like
+Barak and Deborah of old, raised the Teuton tribes.  They might have
+done it before that again, when Hermann slew Varus and his legions in
+the Teutoburger Wald; or before that again, when the Kempers and
+Teutons burst over the Alps, to madden themselves with the fatal
+wines of the rich south.  And why did the Teutons NOT do it?  Because
+they were boys fighting against cunning men.  Boiorich, the young
+Kemper, riding down to Marius' camp, to bid him fix the place and
+time of battle--for the Teuton thought it mean to use surprises and
+stratagems, or to conquer save in fair and open fight--is the type of
+the Teuton hero; and one which had no chance in a struggle with the
+cool, false, politic Roman, grown grey in the experience of the forum
+and of the camp, and still as physically brave as his young enemy.
+Because, too, there was no unity among them; no feeling that they
+were brethren of one blood.  Had the Teuton tribes, at any one of the
+great crises I have mentioned, and at many a crisis afterwards,
+united for but three years, under the feeling of a common blood,
+language, interest, destiny, Rome would have perished.  But they
+could not learn that lesson.  They could not put aside their boyish
+quarrels.
+
+They never learnt the lesson till after their final victory, when the
+Gospel of Christ--of a Being to whom they all owed equal allegiance,
+in whose sight they were all morally equal--came to unite them into a
+Christendom.
+
+And it was well that they did not learn it sooner.  Well for them and
+for the world, that they did not unite on any false ground of
+interest or ambition, but had to wait for the true ground of unity,
+the knowledge of the God-man, King of all nations upon earth.
+
+Had they destroyed Rome sooner, what would not they have lost?  What
+would not the world have lost?  Christianity would have been stifled
+in its very cradle; and with Christianity all chance--be sure of it--
+of their own progress.  Roman law, order, and discipline, the very
+things which they needed to acquire by a contact of five hundred
+years, would have been swept away.  All classic literature and
+classic art, which they learnt to admire with an almost superstitious
+awe, would have perished likewise.  Greek philosophy, the germs of
+physical science, and all that we owe to the ancients, would have
+perished; and we should have truly had an invasion of the barbarians,
+followed by truly dark ages, in which Europe would have had to begin
+all anew, without the help of the generations which had gone before.
+
+Therefore it was well as it was, and God was just and merciful to
+them and to the human race.  They had a glorious destiny, and
+glorious powers wherewith to fulfil it:  but they had, as every man
+and people has, before whom there is a noble future, to be educated
+by suffering.  There was before them a terrible experience of sorrow
+and disappointment, sin and blood, by which they gained the first
+consciousness of what they could do and what they could not.  Like
+Adam of old, like every man unto this day, they ate of the tree of
+the knowledge of good and evil, and were driven out of the paradise
+of unconsciousness; had to begin again sadder and wiser men, and eat
+their bread in the sweat of their brow; and so to rise, after their
+fall, into a nobler, wiser, more artificial, and therefore more truly
+human and divine life, than that from which they had at first fallen,
+when they left their German wilds.
+
+One does not, of course, mean the parallel to fit in all details.
+The fall of the Teuton from the noble simplicity in which Tacitus
+beheld and honoured him, was a work of four centuries; perhaps it was
+going on in Tacitus' own time.  But the culminating point was the
+century which saw Italy conquered, and Rome sacked, by Visigoth, by
+Ostrogoth, by Vandal, till nothing was left save fever-haunted ruins.
+Then the ignorant and greedy child, who had been grasping so long
+after the fair apples of Sodom, clutched them once and for all, and
+found them turn to ashes in his hands.
+
+Yes--it is thus that I wish you to look at the Invasion of the
+Barbarians, Immigration of the Teutons, or whatsoever name you may
+call it.  Before looking at questions of migration, of ethnology, of
+laws, and of classes, look first at the thing itself; and see with
+sacred pity--and awe, one of the saddest and grandest tragedies ever
+performed on earth.  Poor souls!  And they were so simple withal.
+One pities them, as one pities a child who steals apples, and makes
+himself sick with them after all.  It is not the enormous loss of
+life which is to me the most tragic part of the story; it is that
+very simplicity of the Teutons.  Bloodshed is a bad thing, certainly;
+but after all nature is prodigal of human life--killing her twenty
+thousand and her fifty thousand by a single earthquake; and as for
+death in battle--I sometimes am tempted to think, having sat by many
+death beds, that our old forefathers may have been right, and that
+death in battle may be a not unenviable method of passing out of this
+troublesome world.  Besides, we have no right to blame those old
+Teutons, while we are killing every year more of her Majesty's
+subjects by preventible disease, than ever they killed in their
+bloodiest battle.  Let us think of that, and mend that, ere we blame
+the old German heroes.  No, there are more pitiful tragedies than any
+battlefield can shew; and first among them, surely, is the
+disappointment of young hopes, the degradation of young souls.
+
+One pities them, I say.  And they pitied themselves.  Remorse, shame,
+sadness, mark the few legends and songs of the days which followed
+the fall of Rome.  They had done a great work.  They had destroyed a
+mighty tyranny; they had parted between them the spoils wrung from
+all the nations; they had rid the earth of a mighty man-devouring
+ogre, whose hands had been stretched out for centuries over all the
+earth, dragging all virgins to his den, butchering and torturing
+thousands for his sport; foul, too, with crimes for which their
+language, like our own (thank God) has scarcely found a name.
+Babylon the Great, drunken with the blood of the saints, had fallen
+at last before the simple foresters of the north:  but if it looks a
+triumph to us, it looked not such to them.  They could only think how
+they had stained their hands in their brothers' blood.  They had got
+the fatal Nibelungen hoard:  but it had vanished between their hands,
+and left them to kill each other, till none was left.
+
+You know the Nibelungen Lied?  That expresses, I believe, the key-
+note of the old Teuton's heart, after his work was done.  Siegfried
+murdered by his brother-in-law; fair Chriemhild turned into an
+avenging fury; the heroes hewing each other down, they scarce know
+why, in Hunnish Etzel's hall, till Hagen and Gunther stand alone;
+Dietrich of Bern going in, to bind the last surviving heroes;
+Chriemhild shaking Hagen's gory head in Gunther's face, himself hewed
+down by the old Hildebrand, till nothing is left but stark corpses
+and vain tears: --while all the while the Nibelungen hoard, the cause
+of all the woe, lies drowned in the deep Rhine until the judgment
+day.--What is all this, but the true tale of the fall of Rome, of the
+mad quarrels of the conquering Teutons?  The names are confused,
+mythic; the dates and places all awry:  but the tale is true--too
+true.  Mutato nomine fabula narratur.  Even so they went on, killing,
+till none were left.  Deeds as strange, horrible, fratricidal, were
+done, again and again, not only between Frank and Goth, Lombard and
+Gepid, but between Lombard and Lombard, Frank and Frank.  Yes, they
+were drunk with each other's blood, those elder brethren of ours.
+Let us thank God that we did not share their booty, and perish, like
+them, from the touch of the fatal Nibelungen hoard.  Happy for us
+Englishmen, that we were forced to seek our adventures here, in this
+lonely isle; to turn aside from the great stream of Teutonic
+immigration; and settle here, each man on his forest-clearing, to
+till the ground in comparative peace, keeping unbroken the old
+Teutonic laws, unstained the old Teutonic faith and virtue, cursed
+neither with poverty nor riches, but fed with food sufficient for us.
+To us, indeed, after long centuries, peace brought sloth, and sloth
+foreign invaders and bitter woes:  but better so, than that we should
+have cast away alike our virtue and our lives, in that mad quarrel
+over the fairy gold of Rome.
+
+
+
+LECTURE II--THE DYING EMPIRE.
+
+
+
+It is not for me to trace the rise, or even the fall of the Roman
+Empire.  That would be the duty rather of a professor of ancient
+history, than of modern.  All I need do is to sketch, as shortly as I
+can, the state in which the young world found the old, when it came
+in contact with it.
+
+The Roman Empire, toward the latter part of the fourth century, was
+in much the same condition as the Chinese or the Turkish Empire in
+our own days.  Private morality (as Juvenal and Persius will tell
+you), had vanished long before.  Public morality had, of course,
+vanished likewise.  The only powers really recognised were force and
+cunning.  The only aim was personal enjoyment.  The only God was the
+Divus Caesar, the imperial demigod, whose illimitable brute force
+gave him illimitable powers of self-enjoyment, and made him thus the
+paragon and ideal of humanity, whom all envied, flattered, hated, and
+obeyed.  The palace was a sink of corruption, where eunuchs,
+concubines, spies, informers, freedmen, adventurers, struggled in the
+basest plots, each for his share of the public plunder.  The senate
+only existed to register the edicts of their tyrant, and if need be,
+destroy each other, or any one else, by judicial murders, the willing
+tools of imperial cruelty.  The government was administered (at least
+since the time of Diocletian) by an official bureaucracy, of which
+Professor Goldwin Smith well says, 'the earth swarmed with the
+consuming hierarchy of extortion, so that it was said that they who
+received taxes were more than those who paid them.'  The free middle
+class had disappeared, or lingered in the cities, too proud to
+labour, fed on government bounty, and amused by government
+spectacles.  With them, arts and science had died likewise.  Such
+things were left to slaves, and became therefore, literally, servile
+imitations of the past.  What, indeed, was not left to slaves?  Drawn
+without respect of rank, as well as of sex and age, from every nation
+under heaven by an organized slave-trade, to which our late African
+one was but a tiny streamlet compared with a mighty river; a slave-
+trade which once bought 10,000 human beings in Delos in a single day;
+the 'servorum nationes' were the only tillers of the soil, of those
+'latifundia' or great estates, 'quae perdidere Romam.'  Denied the
+rights of marriage, the very name of humanity; protected by no law,
+save the interest or caprice of their masters; subjected, for slight
+offences, to cruel torments, they were butchered by thousands in the
+amphitheatres to make a Roman holiday, or wore out their lives in
+'ergastula' or barracks, which were dens of darkness and horror.
+Their owners, as 'senatores,' 'clarissimi,' or at least 'curiales,'
+spent their lives in the cities, luxurious and effeminate, and left
+their slaves to the tender mercy of 'villici,' stewards and gang-
+drivers, who were themselves slaves likewise.
+
+More pampered, yet more degraded, were the crowds of wretched beings,
+cut off from all the hopes of humanity, who ministered to the wicked
+pleasures of their masters, even in the palaces of nominally
+Christian emperors--but over that side of Roman slavery I must draw a
+veil, only saying, that the atrocities of the Romans toward their
+slaves--especially of this last and darkest kind--notably drew down
+on them the just wrath and revenge of those Teutonic nations, from
+which so many of their slaves were taken. {p15}
+
+And yet they called themselves Christians--to whom it had been said,
+'Be not deceived, God is not mocked.  For these things cometh the
+wrath of God on the children of disobedience.'  And the wrath did
+come.
+
+If such were the morals of the Empire, what was its political state?
+One of complete disorganization.  The only uniting bond left seems to
+have been that of the bureaucracy, the community of tax-gatherers,
+who found it on the whole safer and more profitable to pay into the
+imperial treasury a portion of their plunder, than to keep it all
+themselves.  It stood by mere vi inertiae, just because it happened
+to be there, and there was nothing else to put in its place.  Like an
+old tree whose every root is decayed, it did not fall, simply because
+the storm had not yet come.  Storms, indeed, had come; but they had
+been partial and local.  One cannot look into the pages of Gibbon,
+without seeing that the normal condition of the empire was one of
+revolt, civil war, invasion--Pretenders, like Carausius and Allectus
+in Britain, setting themselves up as emperors for awhile--Bands of
+brigands, like the Bagaudae of Gaul, and the Circumcelliones of
+Africa, wandering about, desperate with hunger and revenge, to slay
+and pillage--Teutonic tribes making forays on the frontier, enlisted
+into the Roman armies, and bought off, or hired to keep back the
+tribes behind them, and perish by their brethren's swords.
+
+What kept the empire standing, paradoxical as it may seem, was its
+own innate weakness.  From within, at least, it could not be
+overthrown.  The masses were too crushed to rise.  Without unity,
+purpose, courage, they submitted to inevitable misery as to rain and
+thunder.  At most they destroyed their own children from poverty, or,
+as in Egypt, fled by thousands into the caves and quarries, and
+turned monks and hermits; while the upper classes, equally without
+unity or purpose, said each to himself, 'Let us eat and drink, for
+to-morrow we die.'
+
+The state of things at Rome, and after the rise of Byzantium under
+Constantine at Byzantium likewise, was one altogether fantastic,
+abnormal, utterly unlike anything that we have seen, or can imagine
+to ourselves without great effort.  I know no better method of
+illustrating it, than quoting, from Mr. Sheppard's excellent book,
+The Fall of Rome and the Rise of New Nationalities, a passage in
+which he transfers the whole comi-tragedy from Italy of old to
+England in 1861.
+
+'I have not thought it necessary to give a separate and distinct
+reply to the theory of Mr. Congreve, that Roman Imperialism was the
+type of all good government, and a desirable precedent for ourselves.
+Those who feel any penchant for the notion, I should strongly
+recommend to read the answer of Professor G. Smith, in the Oxford
+Essays for 1856, which is as complete and crushing as that
+gentleman's performances usually are.  But in order to convey to the
+uninitiated some idea of the state of society under Caesarian rule,
+and which a Caesarian rule, so far as mere government is concerned,
+if it does not produce, has never shewn any tendency to prevent, let
+us give reins to imagination for a moment, and picture to ourselves a
+few social and political analogies in our own England of the
+nineteenth century.
+
+'An entire revolution has taken place in our principles, manners, and
+form of government.  Parliaments, meetings, and all the ordinary
+expressions of the national will, are no longer in existence.  A free
+press has shared their fate.  There is no accredited organ of public
+opinion; indeed there is no public opinion to record.  Lords and
+Commons have been swept away, though a number of the richest old
+gentlemen in London meet daily at Westminster to receive orders from
+Buckingham Palace.  But at the palace itself has broken out one of
+those sanguinary conspiracies which have of late become unceasing.
+The last heir of the house of Brunswick is lying dead with a dagger
+in his heart, and everything is in frightful confusion.  The armed
+force of the capital are of course "masters of the situation," and
+the Guards, after a tumultuous meeting at Windsor or Knightsbridge,
+have sold the throne to Baron Rothschild, for a handsome donation of
+25 pounds a-piece.  Lord Clyde, however, we may be sure, is not
+likely to stand this, and in a few months will be marching upon
+London at the head of the Indian Army.  In the mean time the Channel
+Fleet has declared for its own commander, has seized upon Plymouth
+and Portsmouth, and intends to starve the metropolis by stopping the
+imports of "bread-stuffs" at the mouth of the Thames.  And this has
+become quite possible; for half the population of London, under the
+present state of things, subsist upon free distributions of corn
+dispensed by the occupant of the throne for the time being.  But a
+more fatal change than even this has come over the population of the
+capital and of the whole country.  The free citizens and 'prentices
+of London; the sturdy labourers of Dorsetshire and the eastern
+counties; and the skilful artizans of Manchester, Sheffield and
+Birmingham; the mariners and shipwrights of Liverpool, have been long
+ago drafted into marching regiments, and have left their bones to
+bleach beneath Indian suns and Polar snows.  Their place has been
+supplied by countless herds of negro slaves, who till the fields and
+crowd the workshops of our towns, to the entire exclusion of free
+labour; for the free population, or rather the miserable relics of
+them, disdain all manual employment:  they divide their time between
+starvation and a degrading debauchery, the means for which are
+sedulously provided by the government.  The time-honoured
+institutions of the bull-bait, the cockpit, and the ring, are in
+daily operation, under the most distinguished patronage.  Hyde Park
+has been converted into a gigantic arena, where criminals from
+Newgate "set-to" with the animals from the Zoological Gardens.  Every
+fortnight there is a Derby Day, and the whole population pour into
+the Downs with frantic excitement, leaving the city to the slaves.
+And then the moral condition of this immense mass!  Of the doings
+about the palace we should be sorry to speak.  But the lady
+patronesses of Almack's still more assiduously patronize the prize-
+fights, and one of them has been seen within the ropes, in battle
+array, by the side of Sayers himself.  No tongue may tell the orgies
+enacted, with the aid of French cooks, Italian singers, and foreign
+artists of all sorts, in the gilded saloons of Park Lane and Mayfair.
+Suffice to say, that in them the worst passions of human nature have
+full swing, unmodified by any thought of human or divine restraints,
+and only dashed a little now and then by the apprehension that the
+slaves may rise, and make a clean sweep of the metropolis with fire
+and steel.  But n'importe--Vive la bagatelle!  Mario has just been
+appointed prime minister, and has made a chorus singer from the Opera
+Duke of Middlesex and Governor-General of India.  All wise men and
+all good men despair of the state, but they are not permitted to say
+anything, much less to act.  Mr. Disraeli lost his head a few days
+ago; Lords Palmerston and Derby lie in the Tower under sentence of
+death; Lord Brougham, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and Mr.
+Gladstone, opened their veins and died in a warm bath last week.
+Foreign relations will make a still greater demand on the reader's
+imagination.  We must conceive of England no longer as
+
+
+"A precious stone set in the silver sea,
+Which serves it in the office of a wall,
+Or as a moat defensive of a house."
+
+
+but rather as open to the inroad of every foe whom her aggressive and
+colonizing genius has provoked.  The red man of the West, the Caffre,
+the Sikh, and the Sepoy, Chinese braves, and fierce orientals of all
+sorts, are hovering on her frontiers in "numbers numberless," as the
+flakes of snow in the northern winter.  They are not the impotent
+enemy which we know, but vigorous races, supplied from inexhaustible
+founts of population, and animated by an insatiate appetite for the
+gold and silver, purple and fine linen, rich meats and intoxicating
+drinks of our effete civilization.  And we can no longer oppose them
+with those victorious legions which have fought and conquered in all
+regions of the world.  The men of Waterloo and Inkermann are no more.
+We are compelled to recruit our armies from those very tribes before
+whose swords we are receding!
+
+'Doubtless the ordinary reader will believe this picture to be
+overcharged, drawn with manifest exaggeration, and somewhat
+questionable taste.  EVERY SINGLE STATEMENT WHICH IT CONTAINS may be
+paralleled by the circumstances and events of the decadence of the
+Roman Empire.  The analogous situation was with the subjects of this
+type of all good government, ALWAYS A POSSIBLE, often an actual,
+state of things.  We think this disposes of the theory of Mr.
+Congreve.  With it may advantageously be contrasted the opinion of a
+man of more statesman-like mind.  "The benefits of despotism are
+short-lived; it poisons the very springs which it lays open; if it
+display a merit, it is an exceptional one; if a virtue, it is created
+of circumstances; and when once this better hour has passed away, all
+the vices of its nature break forth with redoubled violence, and
+weigh down society in every direction."  So writes M. Guizot.  Is it
+the language of prophecy as well as of personal experience?'
+
+Mr. Sheppard should have added, to make the picture complete, that
+the Irish have just established popery across St. George's Channel,
+by the aid of re-immigrants from America; that Free Kirk and National
+Kirk are carrying on a sanguinary civil war in Scotland; that the
+Devonshire Wesleyans have just sacked Exeter cathedral, and murdered
+the Bishop at the altar, while the Bishop of London, supported by the
+Jews and the rich churchmen (who are all mixed up in financial
+operations with Baron Rothschild) has just commanded all Dissenters
+to leave the metropolis within three days, under pain of death.
+
+I must add yet one more feature to this fearful, but accurate
+picture, and say how, a few generations forward, an even uglier thing
+would be seen.  The English aristocracy would have been absorbed by
+foreign adventurers.  The grandchildren of these slaves and
+mercenaries would be holding the highest offices in the state and the
+army, naming themselves after the masters who had freed them, or
+disguising their barbarian names by English endings.  The De Fung-
+Chowvilles would be Dukes, the Little-grizzly-bear-Joe-Smiths Earls,
+and the Fitz-Stanleysons, descended from a king of the gipsies who
+enlisted to avoid transportation, and in due time became Commander-
+in-Chief, would rule at Knowsley in place of the Earl of Derby,
+having inherited the same by the summary process of assassination.
+Beggars on horseback, only too literally; married, most of them, to
+Englishwomen of the highest rank; but looking on England merely as a
+prey; without patriotism, without principle; they would destroy the
+old aristocracy by legal murders, grind the people, fight against
+their yet barbarian cousins outside, as long as they were in luck:
+but the moment the luck turned against them, would call in those
+barbarian cousins to help them, and invade England every ten years
+with heathen hordes, armed no more with tulwar and matchlock, but
+with Enfield rifle and Whitworth cannon.  And that, it must be
+agreed, would be about the last phase of the British empire.  If you
+will look through the names which figure in the high places of the
+Roman empire, during the fourth and fifth centuries, you will see how
+few of them are really Roman.  If you will try to investigate, not
+their genealogies--for they have none--not a grandfather among them--
+but the few facts of their lives which have come down to us; you will
+see how that Nemesis had fallen on her which must at last fall on
+every nation which attempts to establish itself on slavery as a legal
+basis.  Rome had become the slave of her own slaves.
+
+It is at this last period, the point when Rome has become the slave
+of her own slaves, that I take up the story of our Teutonic race.
+
+I do not think that anyone will call either Mr. Sheppard's
+statements, or mine, exaggerated, who knows the bitter complaints of
+the wickedness and folly of the time, which are to be found in the
+writings of the Emperor Julian.  Pedant and apostate as he was, he
+devoted his short life to one great idea, the restoration of the
+Roman Empire to what it had been (as he fancied) in the days of the
+virtuous stoic Emperors of the second century.  He found his dream a
+dream, owing to the dead heap of frivolity, sensuality, brutality,
+utter unbelief, not merely in the dead Pagan gods whom he vainly
+tried to restore, but in any god at all, as a living, ruling,
+judging, rewarding, punishing power.
+
+No one, again, will call these statements exaggerated who knows the
+Roman history of his faithful servant and soldier, Ammianus
+Marcellinus, and especially the later books of it, in which he sets
+forth the state of the Empire after Julian's death, under Jovian,
+Procopius, Valentinian, (who kept close to his bed-chamber two she-
+bears who used to eat men, one called Golden Camel, and the other
+Innocence--which latter, when she had devoured a sufficiency of his
+living victims, he set free in the forests as a reward for her
+services--a brutal tyrant, whose only virtue seems to have been his
+chastity); and Valens, the shameless extortioner who perished in that
+great battle of Adrianople, of which more hereafter.  The last five
+remaining books of the honest soldier's story are a tissue of
+horrors, from reading which one turns away as from a slaughter-house
+or a witches' sabbath.
+
+No one, again, will think these statements exaggerated who knows
+Salvian's De Gubernatione Dei.  It has been always and most justly
+held in high esteem, as one great authority of the state of Gaul when
+conquered by the Franks and Goths and Vandals.
+
+Salvian was a Christian gentleman, born somewhere near Treves.  He
+married a Pagan lady of Cologne, converted her, had by her a
+daughter, and then persuaded her to devote herself to celibacy, while
+he did the like.  His father-in-law, Hypatius, quarrelled with him on
+this account; and the letter in which he tries to soothe the old man
+is still extant, a curious specimen of the style of cultivated men in
+that day.  Salvian then went down to the south of France and became a
+priest at Marseilles, and tutor to the sons of Eucherius, the Bishop
+of Lyons.  Eucherius, himself a good man, speaks in terms of
+passionate admiration of Salvian, his goodness, sanctity, learning,
+talents.  Gennadius (who describes him as still living when he wrote,
+about 490) calls him among other encomiums, the Master of Bishops;
+and both mention familiarly this very work, by which he became
+notorious in his own day, and which he wrote about 450 or 455, during
+the invasion of the Britons.  So that we may trust fully that we have
+hold of an authentic contemporaneous work, written by a good man and
+true.
+
+Let me first say a few words on the fact of his having--as many good
+men did then--separated from his wife in order to lead what was
+called a religious life.  It has a direct bearing on the History of
+those days.  One must not praise him because he (in common with all
+Christians of his day) held, no doubt, the belief that marriage was a
+degradation in itself; that though the Church might mend it somewhat
+by exalting it into a sacrament, still, the less of a bad thing the
+better: --a doctrine against which one need not use (thank God) in
+England, the same language which Michelet has most justly used in
+France.  We, being safe from the poison, can afford to talk of it
+calmly.  But I boldly assert, that few more practically immoral
+doctrines than that of the dignity of celibacy and the defilement of
+marriage (which was the doctrine of all Christian devotees for 1000
+years) have, as far as I know, ever been preached to man.  That is a
+strong statement.  It will be answered perhaps, by the patent fact,
+that during those very 1000 years the morality of Europe improved
+more, and more rapidly, than it had ever done before.  I know it; and
+I thank God for it.  But I adhere to my statement, and rejoin--And
+how much more rapidly have the morals of Europe improved, since that
+doctrine has been swept away; and woman, and the love of woman, have
+been restored to their rightful place in the education of man?
+
+But if we do not praise Salvian, we must not blame him, or any one
+else who meant to be an honest and good man.  Such did not see to
+what their celibate notions would lead.  If they had, we must believe
+that they would have acted differently.  And what is more, their
+preference for celibacy was not fancy, but common sense of a very
+lofty kind.  Be sure that when two middle-aged Christian people
+consider it best to part, they have very good reasons for such a
+solemn step, at which only boys or cynics will laugh.  And the
+reasons, in Salvian's case, and many more in his day, are patent to
+common human understanding.  Do not fancy that he had any private
+reason, such as we should very fairly assign now:  public reasons,
+and those, such as God grant no living man may see, caused wise men
+to thank God that they were not burdened with wife and child.
+Remember the years in which Salvian lived--from 416 perhaps to 490.
+It was a day of the Lord such as Joel saw; 'a day of clouds and of
+thick darkness, as the morning spread upon the mountains; a great
+people and strong; there had not been ever the like, neither should
+be any more after it:  the land was a garden of Eden before them, and
+behind them a desolate wilderness:  Yea, and nothing should escape
+them.'  All things were going to wrack; the country was overrun by
+foreign invaders; bankruptcy, devastation, massacre, and captivity
+were for perhaps 100 years the normal state of Gaul, and of most
+other countries besides.  I have little doubt that Salvian was a
+prudent man, when he thought fit to bring no more human beings into
+the world.  That is an ugly thought--I trust that you feel how ugly,
+unnatural, desperate a thought it is.  If you do not, think over it
+till you do, till it frightens you.  You will gain a great step
+thereby in human sympathy, and therefore in the understanding of
+history.  For many times, and in many places, men have said, rightly
+or wrongly, 'It is better to leave none behind me like myself.  The
+miseries of life (and of what comes after this life) are greater than
+its joys.  I commit an act of cruelty by bringing a fresh human being
+into the world.'  I wish you to look at that thought steadily, and
+apply it for yourselves.  It has many applications:  and has
+therefore been a very common one.
+
+But put to yourselves--it is too painful for me to put to you--the
+case of a married gentleman who sees his country gradually devastated
+and brought to utter ruin by foreign invaders; and who feels--as poor
+Salvian felt, that there is no hope or escape; that the misery is
+merited, deserved, fairly EARNED (for that is the true meaning of
+those words), and therefore must come.  Conceive him seeing around
+him estates destroyed, farms burnt, ladies and gentlemen, his own
+friends and relations, reduced in an hour to beggary, plundered,
+stript, driven off in gangs--I do not choose to finish the picture:
+but ask yourselves, would an honourable man wish to bring sons--much
+more daughters--into the world to endure that?
+
+Put yourselves in Salvian's place.  Forget for a few minutes that you
+are Englishmen, the freest and bravest nation upon earth, strong in
+all that gives real strength, and with a volunteer army which is now
+formidable by numbers and courage--which, did the terrible call come,
+might be increased ten times in as many months.  Forget all that
+awhile; and put yourselves in Salvian's place, the gentleman of Gaul,
+while Franks and Goths, Burgunds and Vandals were sweeping, wave
+after wave, over that lovely land; and judge him rationally, and talk
+as little as possible of his superstition, and as much as possible of
+his human feeling, prudence, self-control, and common sense.  Believe
+me, neither celibacy, nor any other seemingly unnatural superstition
+would have held its ground for a generation if there had not been
+some practical considerations of common sense to back them.  We
+wonder why men in old times went into monasteries.  The simplest
+answer is, common sense sent them thither.  They were tired of being
+the slaves of their own passions; they were tired of killing, and of
+running the chance of being killed.  They saw society, the whole
+world, going to wrack, as they thought, around them:  what could they
+do better, than see that their own characters, morals, immortal souls
+did not go to wrack with the rest.  We wonder why women, especially
+women of rank, went into convents; why, as soon as a community of
+monks was founded, a community of nuns sprung up near them.  The
+simplest answer is, common sense sent them thither.  The men,
+especially of the upper fighting classes, were killed off rapidly;
+the women were not killed off, and a large number always remained,
+who, if they had wished to marry, could not.  What better for them
+than to seek in convents that peace which this world could not give?
+
+They may have mixed up with that simple wish for peace the notion of
+being handmaids of God, brides of Christ, and so forth.  Be it so.
+Let us instead of complaining, thank heaven that there was some
+motive, whether quite right or not, to keep alive in them self-
+respect, and the feeling that they were not altogether useless and
+aimless on earth.  Look at the question in this light, and you will
+understand two things; first, how horrible the times were, and
+secondly, why there grew up in the early middle age a passion for
+celibacy.
+
+Salvian, in a word, had already grown up to manhood and reason, when
+he saw a time come to his native country, in which were fulfilled,
+with fearful exactness, the words of the prophet Isaiah:-
+
+
+'Behold, the Lord maketh the land empty, and maketh it waste, and
+turneth it upside down, and scattereth abroad the inhabitants
+thereof.  And it shall be, as with the people, so with the priest; as
+with the slave, so with his master; as with the maid, so with her
+mistress; as with the seller, so with the buyer; as with the lender,
+so with the borrower; as with the taker of usury, so with the giver
+of usury to him.  The land shall be utterly emptied, and utterly
+spoiled; for the Lord hath spoken this word.'
+
+
+And Salvian desired to know the reason why the Lord had spoken that
+word, and read his Bible till he found out, and wrote thereon his
+book De Gubernatione Dei, of the government of God; and a very noble
+book it is.  He takes his stand on the ground of Scripture, with
+which he shews an admirable acquaintance.  The few good were
+expecting the end of the world.  Christ was coming to put an end to
+all these horrors:  but why did he delay his coming?  The many weak
+were crying that God had given up the world; that Christ had deserted
+his Church, and delivered over Christians to the cruelties of heathen
+and Arian barbarians.  The many bad were openly blaspheming, throwing
+off in despair all faith, all bonds of religion, all common decency,
+and crying, Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die.  Salvian
+answers them like an old Hebrew prophet:  'The Lord's arm is not
+shortened.  The Lord's eyes are not closed.  The Lord is still as
+near as ever.  He is governing the world as He has always governed
+it:  by the everlasting moral laws, by which the wages of sin are
+death.  Your iniquities have withheld good things from you.  You have
+earned exactly what God has paid you.  Yourselves are your own
+punishment.  You have been wicked men, and therefore weak men; your
+own vices, and not the Goths, have been your true conquerors.'  As I
+said in my inaugural lecture--that is after all the true theory of
+history.  Men may forget it in piping times of peace.  God grant that
+in the dark hour of adversity, God may always raise up to them a
+prophet, like good old Salvian, to preach to them once again the
+everlasting judgments of God; and teach them that not faulty
+constitutions, faulty laws, faulty circumstances of any kind, but the
+faults of their own hearts and lives, are the causes of their misery.
+
+M. Guizot, in his elaborate work on the History of Civilization in
+France, has a few curious pages, on the causes of the decline of
+civil society in Roman Gaul, and its consequent weakness and ruin.
+He tells you how the Senators or Clarissimi did not constitute a true
+aristocracy, able to lead and protect the people, being at the mercy
+of the Emperor, and nominated and removed at his pleasure.  How the
+Curiales, or wealthy middle class, who were bound by law to fulfil
+all the municipal offices, and were responsible for the collection of
+the revenue, found their responsibilities so great, that they by
+every trick in their power, avoided office.  How, as M. Guizot well
+puts it, the central despotism of Rome stript the Curiales of all
+they earned, to pay its own functionaries and soldiers; and gave them
+the power of appointing magistrates, who were only after all the
+imperial agents of that despotism, for whose sake they robbed their
+fellow-citizens.  How the plebs, comprising the small tradesmen and
+free artizans, were utterly unable to assert their own opinions or
+rights.  How the slave population, though their condition was much
+improved, constituted a mere dead weight of helpless brutality.
+
+And then he says, that the Roman Empire was dying.  Very true:  but
+often as he quotes Salvian, he omits always to tell us what Roman
+society was dying of.  Salvian says, that it was dying of vice.  Not
+of bad laws and class arrangements, but of bad men.  M. Guizot
+belongs to a school which is apt to impute human happiness and
+prosperity too exclusively to the political constitution under which
+they may happen to live, irrespectively of the morality of the people
+themselves.  From that, the constitutionalist school, there has been
+of late a strong reaction, the highest exponent, nay the very
+coryphaeus of which is Mr. Carlyle.  He undervalues, even despises,
+the influence of laws and constitutions:  with him private virtue,
+from which springs public virtue, is the first and sole cause of
+national prosperity.  My inaugural lecture has told you how deeply I
+sympathize with his view--taking my stand, as Mr. Carlyle does, on
+the Hebrew prophets.
+
+There is, nevertheless, a side of truth in the constitutionalist
+view, which Mr. Carlyle, I think, overlooks.  A bad political
+constitution does produce poverty and weakness:  but only in as far
+as it tends to produce moral evil; to make men bad.  That it can help
+to do.  It can put a premium on vice, on falsehood, on peculation, on
+laziness, on ignorance; and thus tempt the mass to moral degradation,
+from the premier to the slave.  Russia has been, for two centuries
+now but too patent a proof of the truth of this assertion.  But even
+in this case, the moral element is the most important, and just the
+one which is overlooked.  To have good laws, M. Guizot is apt to
+forget, you must first have good men to make them; and second, you
+must have good men to carry them out, after they are made.  Bad men
+can abuse the best of laws, the best of constitutions.  Look at the
+working of our parliaments during the reigns of William III and Anne,
+and see how powerless good constitutions are, when the men who work
+them are false and venal.  Look, on the other hand, at the Roman
+Empire from the time of Vespasian to that of the Antonines, and see
+how well even a bad constitution will succeed, when good men are
+working it.
+
+Bad laws, I say, will work tolerably under good men, if fitted to the
+existing circumstances by men of the world, as all Roman laws were.
+If they had not been such, how was the Roman Empire, at least in its
+first years, a blessing to the safety, prosperity, and wealth of
+every country it enslaved?  But when defective Roman laws began to be
+worked by bad men, and that for 200 years, then indeed came times of
+evil.  Let us take, then, Salvian's own account of the cause of Roman
+decay.  He, an eye-witness, imputes it all to the morals of Roman
+citizens.  They were, according to him, of the very worst.  To the
+general dissoluteness he attributes, in plain words, the success of
+the Frank and Gothic invaders.  And the facts which he gives, and
+which there is no reason to doubt, are quite enough to prove him in
+the right.  Every great man's house, he says, was a sink of
+profligacy.  The women slaves were at the mercy of their master; and
+the slaves copied his morals among themselves.  It is an ugly
+picture:  but common sense will tell us, if we but think a little,
+that such will, and must, be the case in slave-holding countries,
+wherever Christianity is not present in its purest and strongest
+form, to control the passions of arbitrary power.
+
+But there was not merely profligacy among these Gauls.  That alone
+would not have wrought their immediate ruin.  Morals were bad enough
+in old Greece and Rome; as they were afterwards among the Turks:
+nevertheless as long as a race is strong; as long as there is
+prudence, energy, deep national feeling, outraged virtue does not
+avenge itself at once by general ruin.  But it avenges itself at
+last, as Salvian shews--as all experience shews.  As in individuals
+so in nations, unbridled indulgence of the passions must produce, and
+does produce, frivolity, effeminacy, slavery to the appetite of the
+moment, a brutalized and reckless temper, before which, prudence,
+energy, national feeling, any and every feeling which is not centered
+in self, perishes utterly.  The old French noblesse gave a proof of
+this law, which will last as a warning beacon to the end of time.
+The Spanish population of America, I am told, gives now a fearful
+proof of this same terrible penalty.  Has not Italy proved it
+likewise, for centuries past?  It must be so, gentlemen.  For
+national life is grounded on, is the development of, the life of the
+family.  And where the root is corrupt, the tree must be corrupt
+likewise.  It must be so.  For Asmodeus does not walk alone.  In his
+train follow impatience and disappointment, suspicion and jealousy,
+rage and cruelty, and all the passions which set man's hand against
+his fellow-man.  It must be so.  For profligacy is selfishness; and
+the family, and the society, the nation, exists only by casting away
+selfishness and by obeying law:- not only the outward law, which says
+in the name of God, 'Thou shalt not,' but the inward law, the Law of
+Christ, which says, 'Thou must;' the law of self-sacrifice, which
+selfish lust tramples under foot, till there is no more cohesion left
+between man and man, no more trust, no more fellow-help, than between
+the stags who fight for the hinds; and God help the nation which has
+brought itself to that!
+
+No wonder, therefore, if Salvian's accounts of Gaulish profligacy be
+true, that Gaulish recklessness reached at last a pitch all but
+incredible.  It is credible, however shocking, that as he says, he
+himself saw, both at Treves, and another great city (probably
+Cologne, Colonia Agrippina, or 'The Colony' par excellence) while the
+destruction of the state was imminent, 'old men of rank, decrepit
+Christians, slaves to gluttony and lust, rabid with clamour, furious
+with bacchanalian orgies.'  It is credible, however shocking, that
+all through Gaul the captivity was 'foreseen, yet never dreaded.'
+And 'so when the barbarians had encamped almost in sight, there was
+no terror among the people, no care of the cities.  All was possest
+by carelessness and sloth, gluttony, drunkenness, sleep, according to
+that which the prophet saith:  A sleep from the Lord had come over
+them.'  It is credible, however shocking, that though Treves was four
+times taken by the barbarians, it remained just as reckless as ever;
+and that--I quote Salvian still--when the population was half
+destroyed by fire and sword, the poor dying of famine, corpses of men
+and women lying about the streets breeding pestilence, while the dogs
+devoured them, the few nobles who were left comforted themselves by
+sending to the Emperor to beg for Circensian games.
+
+Those Circensian games, and indeed all the public spectacles, are
+fresh proofs of what I said just now; that if a bad people earn bad
+government, still a bad government makes a bad people.
+
+They were the most extraordinary instance which the world ever saw,
+of a government setting to work at a vast expense to debauch its
+subjects.  Whether the Roman rulers set that purpose consciously
+before them, one dare not affirm.  Their notion probably was (for
+they were as worldly wise as they were unprincipled) that the more
+frivolous and sensual the people were, the more quietly they would
+submit to slavery; and the best way to keep them frivolous and
+sensual, the Romans knew full well; so well, that after the Empire
+became Christian, and many heathen matters were done away with, they
+did not find it safe to do away with the public spectacles.  The
+temples of the Gods might go:  but not the pantomimes.
+
+In one respect, indeed, these government spectacles became worse, not
+better, under Christianity.  They were less cruel, no doubt:  but
+also they were less beautiful.  The old custom of exhibiting
+representations of the old Greek myths, which had something of grace
+and poetry about them, and would carry back the spectators' thoughts
+to the nobler and purer heroic ages, disappeared before Christianity;
+but the old vice did not.  That was left; and no longer ennobled by
+the old heroic myths round which it had clustered itself, was simply
+of the silliest and most vulgar kind.  We know in detail the
+abominations, as shameless and ridiculous, which went on a century
+after Salvian, in the theatres of Constantinople, under the eyes of
+the most Christian Emperor Justinian, and which won for that most
+infamous woman, Theodora, a share in his imperial crown, and the
+right to dictate doctrine to the Christian Bishops of the East, and
+to condemn the soul of Origen to everlasting damnation, for having
+exprest hopes of the final pardon of sinners.  We can well believe,
+therefore, Salvian's complaints of the wickedness of those pantomimes
+of which he says, that 'honeste non possunt vel accusari;' he cannot
+even accuse them without saying what he is ashamed to say; I believe
+also his assertion, that they would not let people be modest, even if
+they wished; that they inflamed the passions, and debauched the
+imaginations of young and old, man and woman, and--but I am not here
+to argue that sin is sin, or that the population of London would be
+the worse if the most shameless persons among them were put by the
+Government in possession of Drury Lane and Covent Garden; and that,
+and nothing less than that, did the Roman pantomimes mean, from the
+days of Juvenal till those of the most holy and orthodox Empress
+Theodora.
+
+'Who, knowing the judgment of God, that they who do such things are
+worthy of death, not only do the same, but have pleasure in them that
+do them.'
+
+Now in contrast to all these abominations, old Salvian sets, boldly
+and honestly, the superior morality of the barbarians.  That, he
+says, is the cause of their strength and our weakness.  We,
+professing orthodoxy, are profligate hypocrites.  They, half
+heathens, half Arians, are honester men, purer men than we.  There is
+no use, he says, in despising the Goths as heretics, while they are
+better men than we.  They are better Christians than the Romans,
+because they are better men.  They pray to God for success, and trust
+in him, and we presumptuously trust in ourselves.  We swear by
+Christ:  but what do we do but blaspheme him, when we swear 'Per
+Christum tollo eum,' 'I will make away with him,' 'Per Christum hunc
+jugulo,' 'I will cut his throat,' and then believe ourselves bound to
+commit the murder which we have vowed? . . . 'The Saxons,' he says,
+'are fierce, the Franks faithless, the Gepidae inhuman, the Huns
+shameless.  But is the Frank's perfidy as blameable as ours?  Is the
+Alman's drunkenness, or the Alan's rapacity, as damnable as a
+Christian's?  If a Hun or a Gepid deceives you, what wonder?  He is
+utterly ignorant that there is any sin in falsehood.  But what of the
+Christian who does the same?  The Barbarians,' he says, 'are better
+men than the Christians.  The Goths,' he says, 'are perfidious, but
+chaste.  The Alans unchaste, but less perfidious.  The Franks are
+liars, but hospitable; the Saxons ferociously cruel, but venerable
+for their chastity.  The Visigoths who conquered Spain,' he says,
+'were the most "ignavi" (heavy, I presume he means, and loutish) of
+all the barbarians:  but they were chaste, and therefore they
+conquered.'
+
+In Africa, if we are to believe Salvian, things stood even worse, at
+the time of the invasion of the Vandals.  In his violent invectives
+against the Africans, however, allowance must be made.  Salvian was a
+great lover of monks; and the Africans used, he says, to detest them,
+and mob them wherever they appeared; for which offence, of course, he
+can find no words too strong.  St. Augustine, however, himself a
+countryman of theirs, who died, happily, just before the storm burst
+on that hapless land, speaks bitterly of their exceeding profligacy--
+of which he himself in his wild youth, had had but too sad
+experience.  Salvian's assertion is, that the Africans were the most
+profligate of all the Romans; and that while each barbarian tribe had
+(as we have just seen) some good in them, the Africans had none.
+
+But there were noble souls left among them, lights which shone all
+the more brightly in the surrounding darkness.  In the pages of
+Victor Vitensis, which tell the sad story of the persecution of the
+African Catholics by the Arian Vandals, you will find many a moving
+tale which shews that God had his own, even among those degraded
+Carthaginians.
+
+The causes of the Arian hatred to the Catholics is very obscure.  You
+will find all that is known in Dean Milman's History of Latin
+Christianity.  A simple explanation may be found in the fact that the
+Catholics considered the Arians, and did not conceal their opinion,
+as all literally and actually doomed to the torments of everlasting
+fire; and that, as Gibbon puts it, 'The heroes of the north, who had
+submitted with some reluctance, to believe that all their ancestors
+were in hell, were astonished and exasperated to learn, that they
+themselves had only changed the mode of their eternal condemnation.'
+The Teutons were (Salvian himself confesses it) trying to serve God
+devoutly, in chastity, sobriety, and honesty, according to their
+light.  And they were told by the profligates of Africa, that this
+and no less, was their doom.  It is not to be wondered at, again, if
+they mistook the Catholic creed for the cause of Catholic immorality.
+That may account for the Vandal custom of re-baptizing the Catholics.
+It certainly accounts for the fact (if after all it be a fact) which
+Victor states, that they tortured the nuns to extort from them
+shameful confessions against the priests.  But the history of the
+African persecution is the history of all persecutions, as confest
+again and again by the old fathers, as proved by the analogies of
+later times.  The sins of the Church draw down punishment, by making
+her enemies confound her doctrine and her practice.  But in return,
+the punishment of the Church purifies her, and brings out her
+nobleness afresh, as the snake casts his skin in pain, and comes out
+young and fair once more; and in every dark hour of the Church, there
+flashes out some bright form of human heroism, to be a beacon and a
+comfort to all future time.  Victor, for instance, tells the story of
+Dionysia, the beautiful widow whom the Vandals tried to torture into
+denying the Divinity of our Lord.--How when they saw that she was
+bolder and fairer than all the other matrons, they seized her, and
+went to strip her:  and she cried to them, 'Qualiter libet occidite:
+verecunda tamen membra nolite nudare,' but in vain.  They hung her up
+by the hands, and scourged her till streams of blood ran down every
+limb.  Her only son, a delicate boy, stood by trembling, knowing that
+his turn would come next; and she saw it, and called to him in the
+midst of her shame and agony.  'He had been baptized into the name of
+the Blessed Trinity; let him die in that name, and not lose the
+wedding-garment.  Let him fear the pain that never ends, and cling to
+the life that endures for ever.'  The boy took heart, and when his
+turn came, died under the torture; and Dionysia took up the little
+corpse, and buried it in her own house; and worshipped upon her boy's
+grave to her dying day.
+
+Yes.  God had his own left, even among those fallen Africans of
+Carthage.
+
+But neither there, nor in Spain, could the Vandals cure the evil.
+'Now-a-days,' says Salvian, 'there are no profligates among the
+Goths, save Romans; none among the Vandals, save Romans.  Blush,
+Roman people, everywhere, blush for your morals.  There is hardly a
+city free from dens of sin, and none at all from impurity, save those
+which the barbarians have begun to occupy.  And do we wonder if we
+are surpassed in power, by an enemy who surpasses us in decency?  It
+is not the natural strength of their bodies which makes them conquer
+us.  We have been conquered only by the vices of our own morals.'
+
+Yes.  Salvian was right.  Those last words were no mere outburst of
+national vanity, content to confess every sin, save that of being
+cowards.  He was right.  It was not the mere muscle of the Teuton
+which enabled him to crush the decrepit and debauched slave-nations,
+Gaul and Briton, Iberian and African, as the ox crushes the frogs of
+the marsh.  The 'sera juvenum Venus, ideoque inexhausta pubertas,'
+had given him more than his lofty stature, and his mighty limbs.  Had
+he had nought but them, he might have remained to the end a blind
+Samson, grinding among the slaves in Caesar's mill, butchered to make
+a Roman holiday.  But it had given him more, that purity of his; it
+had given him, as it may give you, gentlemen, a calm and steady
+brain, and a free and loyal heart; the energy which springs from
+health; the self-respect which comes from self-restraint; and the
+spirit which shrinks from neither God nor man, and feels it light to
+die for wife and child, for people, and for Queen.
+
+
+
+PREFACE TO LECTURE III.--ON DR. LATHAM'S 'GERMANIA.'
+
+
+
+If I have followed in these lectures the better known and more widely
+received etymology of the name Goth, I have done so out of no
+disrespect to Dr. Latham; but simply because his theory seems to me
+adhuc sub judice.  It is this, as far as I understand it.  That
+'Goth' was not the aboriginal name of the race.  That they were
+probably not so called till they came into the land of the Getae,
+about the mouths of the Danube.  That the Teutonic name for the
+Ostrogoths was Grutungs, and that of the Visigoths (which he does not
+consider to mean West-Goths) Thervings, Thuringer.  That on reaching
+the land of the Getae they took their name; 'just as the Kentings of
+Anglo-Saxon England took name from the Keltic country of Kent;' and
+that the names Goth, Gothones, Gothini were originally given to
+Lithuanians by their Sclavonic neighbours.  I merely state the
+theory, and leave it for the judgment of others.
+
+The principal points which Dr. Latham considers himself to have
+established, are -
+
+That the area and population of the Teutonic tribes have been, on the
+authority of Tacitus, much overrated; many tribes hitherto supposed
+to be Teutonic being really Sclavonic, &c.
+
+This need not shock our pride, if proved--as it seems to me to be.
+The nations who have influenced the world's destiny have not been
+great, in the modern American sense of 'big;' but great in heart, as
+our forefathers were.  The Greeks were but a handful at Salamis; so
+were the Romans of the Republic; so were the Spaniards of America;
+so, probably, were the Aztecs and Incas whom they overthrew; and
+surely our own conquerors and re-conquerers of Hindostan have shewn
+enough that it is not numbers, but soul, which gives a race the power
+to rule.
+
+Neither need we object to Dr. Latham's opinion, that more than one of
+the tribes which took part in the destruction of the Empire were not
+aboriginal Germans, but Sclavonians Germanized, and under German
+leaders.  It may be so.  The custom of enslaving captives would
+render pure Teutonic blood among the lower classes of a tribe the
+exception and not the rule; while the custom of chiefs choosing the
+'thegns,' 'gesitha,' or 'comites,' who lived and died as their
+companions-in-arms, from among the most valiant of the unfree, would
+tend to produce a mixed blood in the upper classes also, and
+gradually assimilate the whole mass to the manners and laws of their
+Teutonic lords.  Only by some such actual superiority of the upper
+classes to the lower can I explain the deep respect for rank and
+blood, which distinguishes, and will perhaps always distinguish, the
+Teutonic peoples.  Had there even been anything like a primaeval
+equality among our race, a hereditary aristocracy could never have
+arisen, or if arising for a while, never could have remained as a
+fact which all believed in, from the lowest to the highest.  Just, or
+unjust, the institution represented, I verily believe, an
+ethnological fact.  The golden-haired hero said to his brown-haired
+bondsman, 'I am a gentleman, who have a "gens," a stamm, a pedigree,
+and know from whom I am sprung.  I am a Garding, an Amalung, a
+Scylding, an Osing, or what not.  I am a son of the gods.  The blood
+of the Asas is in my veins.  Do you not see it?  Am I not wiser,
+stronger, more virtuous, more beautiful than you?  You must obey me,
+and be my man, and follow me to the death.  Then, if you prove a
+worthy thane, I will give you horse, weapons, bracelets, lands; and
+marry you, it may be, to my daughter or my niece.  And if not, you
+must remain a son of the earth, grubbing in the dust of which you
+were made.'  And the bondsman believed him; and became his lord's
+man, and followed him to the death; and was thereby not degraded, but
+raised out of selfish savagery and brute independence into loyalty,
+usefulness, and self-respect.  As a fact, that is the method by which
+the thing was done:  done;--very ill indeed, as most human things are
+done; but a method inevitable--and possibly right; till (as in
+England now) the lower classes became ethnologically identical with
+the upper, and equality became possible in law, simply because it
+existed in fact.
+
+But the part of Dr. Latham's 'Germania' to which I am bound to call
+most attention, because I have not followed it, is that interesting
+part of the Prolegomena, in which he combats the generally received
+theory, that, between the time of Tacitus and that of Charlemagne,
+vast masses of Germans had migrated southward from between the Elbe
+and the Vistula; and that they had been replaced by the Sclavonians
+who certainly were there in Charlemagne's days.
+
+Dr. Latham argues against this theory with a great variety of facts
+and reasons.  But has he not overstated his case on some points?
+
+Need the migrations necessary for this theory have been of
+'unparalleled magnitude and rapidity'?
+
+As for the 'unparalleled completeness' on which he lays much stress,
+from the fact that no remnants of Teutonic population are found in
+the countries evacuated:
+
+Is it the fact that 'history only tells us of German armies having
+advanced south'?  Do we not find four famous cases--the irruption of
+the Cimbri and Teutons into Italy; the passage of the Danube by the
+Visigoths; and the invasions of Italy first by the Ostrogoths, then
+by the Lombards--in which the nations came with men, women, and
+children, horses, cattle, and dogs, bag and baggage?  May not this
+have been the custom of the race, with its strong feeling for the
+family tie; and may not this account for no traces of them being left
+behind?
+
+Does not Dr. Latham's theory proceed too much on an assumption that
+the Sclavonians dispossest the Teutons by force?  And is not this
+assumption his ground for objecting that the movement was effected
+improbably 'by that division of the European population (the
+Sclavonic and Lithuanian) which has, within the historic period,
+receded before the Germanic'?
+
+Are these migrations, though 'unrepresented in any history' (i.e.
+contemporaneous), really 'unrepresented in any tradition'?  Do not
+the traditions of Jornandes and Paulus Diaconus, that the Goths and
+the Lombards came from Scandinavia, represent this very fact?--and
+are they to be set aside as naught?  Surely not.  Myths of this kind
+generally embody a nucleus of truth, and must be regarded with
+respect; for they often, after all arguments about them are spent,
+are found to contain the very pith of the matter.
+
+Are the 'phenomena of replacement and substitution' so very strange--
+I will not say upon the popular theory, but at least on one half-way
+between it and Dr. Latham's?  Namely -
+
+That the Teutonic races came originally, as some of them say they
+did, from Scandinavia, Denmark, the South Baltic, &c.
+
+That they forced their way down, wave after wave, on what would have
+been the line of least resistance--the Marches between the Gauls,
+Romanized or otherwise, and the Sclavonians.  And that the Alps and
+the solid front of the Roman Empire turned them to the East, till
+their vanguard found itself on the Danube.
+
+This would agree with Dr. Latham's most valuable hint, that Markmen,
+'Men of the Marches,' was perhaps the name of many German tribes
+successively.
+
+That they fought, as they went, with the Sclavonian and other tribes
+(as their traditions seem to report), and rolled them back to the
+eastward; and that as each Teutonic tribe past down the line, the
+Sclavonians rolled back again, till the last column was past.
+
+That the Teutons also carried down with them, as slaves or allies, a
+portion of this old Sclavonic population (to which Dr. Latham will
+perhaps agree); and that this fact caused a hiatus, which was
+gradually filled by tribes who after all were little better than
+nomad hunters, and would occupy (quite nominally) a very large tract
+with a small population.
+
+Would not this theory agree at once tolerably with the old traditions
+and with Dr. Latham's new facts?
+
+The question still remains--which is the question of all.  What put
+these Germanic peoples on going South?  Were there no causes
+sufficient to excite so desperate a resolve?
+
+(1)  Did they all go?  Is not Paulus Diaconus' story that one-third
+of the Lombards was to emigrate by lot, and two-thirds remain at
+home, a rough type of what generally happened--what happens now in
+our modern emigrations?  Was not the surplus population driven off by
+famine toward warmer and more hopeful climes?
+
+(2)  Are not the Teutonic populations of England, North Germany, and
+the Baltic, the descendants, much intermixed, and with dialects much
+changed, of the portions which were left behind?  This is the
+opinion, I believe, of several great ethnologists.  Is it not true?
+If philological objections are raised to this, I ask (but in all
+humility), Did not these southward migrations commence long before
+the time of Tacitus?  If so, may they not have commenced before the
+different Teutonic dialects were as distinct as they were in the
+historic period?  And are we to suppose that the dialects did not
+alter during the long journeyings through many nations?  Is it
+possible that the Thervings and Grutungs could have retained the same
+tongue on the Danube, as their forefathers spoke in their native
+land?  Would not the Moeso-Gothic of Ulfilas have been all but
+unintelligible to the Goth who, upon the old theory, remained in
+Gothland of Sweden?
+
+(3)  But were there not more causes than mere want, which sent them
+south?  Had the peculiar restlessness of the race nothing to do with
+it?  A restlessness not nomadic, but migratory:  arising not from
+carelessness of land and home, but from the longing to found a home
+in a new land, like the restlessness of us, their children?  As soon
+as we meet them in historic times, they are always moving, migrating,
+invading.  Were they not doing the same in pre-historic times, by
+fits and starts, no doubt with periods of excitement, periods of
+collapse and rest?  When we recollect the invasion of the Normans;
+the wholesale eastward migration of the Crusaders, men, women, and
+children; and the later colonization by Teutonic peoples, of every
+quarter of the globe, is there anything wonderful in the belief that
+similar migratory manias may have seized the old tribes; that the
+spirit of Woden, 'the mover,' may have moved them, and forced them to
+go ahead, as now?  Doubtless the theory is strange.  But the Teutons
+were and are a strange people; so strange, that they have conquered--
+one may almost say that they are--all nations which are alive upon
+the globe; and we may therefore expect them to have done strange
+things even in their infancy.
+
+The Romans saw them conquer the empire; and said, the good men among
+them, that it was on account of their superior virtue.  But beside
+the virtue which made them succeed, there must have been the
+adventurousness which made them attempt.  They were a people fond of
+'avanturen,' like their descendants; and they went out to seek them;
+and found enough and to spare.
+
+(4)  But more, had they never heard of Rome?  Surely they had, and at
+a very early period of the empire.  We are apt to forget, that for
+every discovery of the Germans by the Romans, there was a similar
+discovery of the Romans by the Germans, and one which would tell
+powerfully on their childish imagination.  Did not one single Kemper
+or Teuton return from Marius' slaughter, to spread among the tribes
+(niddering though he may have been called for coming back alive) the
+fair land which they had found, fit for the gods of Valhalla; the
+land of sunshine, fruits and wine, wherein his brothers' and sisters'
+bones were bleaching unavenged?  Did no gay Gaul of the Legion of the
+Lark, boast in a frontier wine-house to a German trapper, who came in
+to sell his peltry, how he himself was a gentleman now, and a
+civilized man, and a Roman; and how he had followed Julius Caesar,
+the king of men, over the Rubicon, and on to a city of the like of
+which man never dreamed, wherein was room for all the gods of heaven?
+Did no captive tribune of Varus' legions, led with horrid shouts
+round Thor's altar in the Teutoburger Wald, ere his corpse was hung
+among the horses and goats on the primaeval oaks, turn to bay like a
+Roman, and tell his wild captors of the Eternal City, and of the
+might of that Caesar who would avenge every hair upon his head with a
+German life; and receive for answer a shout of laughter, and the cry-
+-'You have come to us:  and some day we will go to you?'  Did no
+commissary, bargaining with a German for cattle to be sent over the
+frontier by such a day of the week, and teaching him to mistranslate
+into those names of Thor, Woden, Freya, and so forth, which they now
+carry, the Jewish-Assyrian-Roman days of the se'nnight, amuse the
+simple forester by telling him how the streets of Rome were paved
+with gold, and no one had anything to do there but to eat and bathe
+at the public expense, and to go to the theatre, and see 20,000
+gladiators fight at once?  Did no German 'Regulus,' alderman, or
+king, enter Rome on an embassy, and come back with uplifted eyes and
+hands, declaring that he had seen things unspeakable--a 'very fine
+plunder,' as Blucher said of London; and that if it were not for the
+walls, they might get it all; for not only the ladies, but the
+noblemen, went about in litters of silver and gold, and wore gauze
+dresses, the shameless wretches, through which you might see every
+limb, so that as for killing them, there was no more fear of them
+than of a flock of sheep:  but that he did not see as well as he
+could have wished how to enter the great city, for he was more or
+less the worse for liquor the whole time, with wondrous stuff which
+they called wine?  Or did no captive, escaped by miracle from the
+butcheries of the amphitheatre, return to tell his countrymen how all
+the rest had died like German men; and call on them to rise and
+avenge their brothers' blood?  Yes, surely the Teutons knew well,
+even in the time of Tacitus, of the 'micklegard,' the great city and
+all its glory.  Every fresh tribe who passed along the frontier of
+Gaul or of Noricum would hear more and more of it, see more and more
+men who had actually been there.  If the glory of the city exercised
+on its own inhabitants an intoxicating influence, as of a place
+omnipotent, superhuman, divine--it would exercise (exaggerated as it
+would be) a still stronger influence on the barbarians outside:  and
+what wonder if they pressed southwards at first in the hope of taking
+the mighty city; and afterwards, as her real strength became more
+known, of at least seizing some of those colonial cities, which were
+as superhuman in their eyes as Rome itself would have been?  In the
+crusades, the children, whenever they came to a great town, asked
+their parents if that was not Jerusalem.  And so, it may be, many a
+gallant young Teuton, on entering for the first time such a city as
+Cologne, Lyons, or Vienna, whispered half trembling to his lord--
+'Surely this must be Rome.'
+
+Some such arguments as these might surely be brought in favour of a
+greater migration than Dr. Latham is inclined to allow:  but I must
+leave the question for men of deeper research and wider learning,
+than I possess.
+
+
+
+LECTURE III.--THE HUMAN DELUGE
+
+
+
+'I have taken in hand,' said Sir Francis Drake once to the crew of
+the immortal Pelican, 'that which I know not how to accomplish.  Yea,
+it hath even bereaved me of my wits to think of it.'
+
+And so I must say on the subject of this lecture.  I wish to give you
+some notion of the history of Italy for nearly one hundred years; say
+from 400 to 500.  But it is very difficult.  How can a man draw a
+picture of that which has no shape; or tell the order of absolute
+disorder?  It is all a horrible 'fourmillement des nations,' like the
+working of an ant-heap; like the insects devouring each other in a
+drop of water.  Teuton tribes, Sclavonic tribes, Tartar tribes, Roman
+generals, empresses, bishops, courtiers, adventurers, appear for a
+moment out of the crowd, dim phantoms--nothing more, most of them--
+with a name appended, and then vanish, proving their humanity only by
+leaving behind them one more stain of blood.
+
+And what became of the masses all the while? of the men, slaves the
+greater part of them, if not all, who tilled the soil, and ground the
+corn--for man must have eaten, then as now?  We have no hint.  One
+trusts that God had mercy on them, if not in this world, still in the
+world to come.  Man, at least, had none.
+
+Taking one's stand at Rome, and looking toward the north, what does
+one see for nearly one hundred years?  Wave after wave rising out of
+the north, the land of night, and wonder, and the terrible unknown;
+visible only as the light of Roman civilization strikes their crests,
+and they dash against the Alps, and roll over through the mountain
+passes, into the fertile plains below.  Then at last they are seen
+but too well; and you discover that the waves are living men, women,
+and children, horses, dogs, and cattle, all rushing headlong into
+that great whirlpool of Italy:  and yet the gulf is never full.  The
+earth drinks up the blood; the bones decay into the fruitful soil;
+the very names and memories of whole tribes are washed away.  And the
+result of an immigration which may be counted by hundreds of
+thousands is this--that all the land is waste.
+
+The best authorities which I can give you (though you will find many
+more in Gibbon) are--for the main story, Jornandes, De Rebus Geticis.
+Himself a Goth, he wrote the history of his race, and that of Attila
+and his Huns, in good rugged Latin, not without force and sense.
+
+Then Claudian, the poet, a bombastic panegyrist of contemporary Roman
+scoundrels; but full of curious facts, if one could only depend on
+them.
+
+Then the earlier books of Procopius De Bello Gothico, and the
+Chronicle of Zosimus.
+
+Salvian, Ennodius and Sidonius Apollinaris, as Christians, will give
+you curious details, especially as to South France and North Italy;
+while many particulars of the first sack of Rome, with comments
+thereon which express the highest intellects of that day, you will
+find in St. Jerome's Letters, and St. Augustine's City of God.
+
+But if you want these dreadful times EXPLAINED to you, I do not think
+you can do better than to take your Bibles, and to read the
+Revelations of St. John the Apostle.  I shall quote them, more than
+once, in this lecture.  I cannot help quoting them.  The words come
+naturally to my lips, as fitter to the facts than any words of my
+own.
+
+I do not come here to interpret the Book of Revelations.  I do not
+understand that book.  But I do say plainly, though I cannot
+interpret the book, that the book has interpreted those times to me.
+Its awful metaphors give me more living and accurate pictures of what
+went on than any that Gibbon's faithful details can give.
+
+You may see, if you have spiritual eyes wherewith to see, the Dragon,
+the serpent, symbol of political craft and the devilish wisdom of the
+Roman, giving authority to the Beast, the symbol of brute power; to
+mongrel AEtiuses and Bonifaces, barbarian Stilichos, Ricimers and
+Aspars, and a host of similar adventurers, whose only strength was
+force.
+
+You may see the world wondering after the beast, and worshipping
+brute force, as the only thing left to believe in.
+
+You may see the nations of the world gnawing their tongues for pain,
+and blaspheming God, but not repenting of their deeds.
+
+You may see the faith and patience of the saints--men like Augustine,
+Salvian, Epiphanius, Severinus, Deogratias of Carthage, and a host
+more, no doubt, whose names the world will never hear--the salt of
+the earth, which kept it all from rotting.
+
+You may see Babylon the great fallen, and all the kings and merchants
+of the earth bewailing her afar off, and watching the smoke of her
+torment.
+
+You may see, as St. John warns you, that--after her fall, mind--if
+men would go on worshipping the beast, and much more his image--the
+phantom and shadow of brute force, after the reality had passed away-
+-they should drink of the wine of the wrath of God, and be tormented
+for ever.  For you may see how those degenerate Romans did go on
+worshipping the shadow of brute force, and how they were tormented
+for ever; and had no rest day or night, because they worshipped the
+Beast and his image.
+
+You may see all the fowl of the heavens flocking together to the
+feast of the great God, to eat the flesh of kings and captains, horse
+and rider, bond and free.--All carrion-birds, human as well as brute-
+-All greedy villains and adventurers, the scoundreldom of the whole
+world, flocking in to get their share of the carcass of the dying
+empire; as the vulture and the raven flock in to the carrion when the
+royal eagles have gorged their fill.
+
+And lastly, you may see, if God give you grace, One who is faithful
+and true, with a name which no man knew, save Himself, making war in
+righteousness against all evil; bringing order out of disorder, hope
+out of despair, fresh health and life out of old disease and death;
+executing just judgment among all the nations of the earth; and
+sending down from heaven the city of God, in the light of which the
+nations of those who are saved should walk, and the kings of the
+earth should bring their power and their glory into it; with the tree
+of life in the midst of it, whose leaves should be for the healing of
+the nations.
+
+Again, I say, I am not here to interpret the Book of Revelations; but
+this I say, that that book interprets those times to me.
+
+Leaving, for the present at least, to better historians than myself
+the general subject of the Teutonic immigrations; the conquest of
+North Gaul by the Franks, of Britain by the Saxons and Angles, of
+Burgundy by the Burgundians, of Africa by the Vandals, I shall speak
+rather of those Teutonic tribes which actually entered and conquered
+Italy; and first, of course, of the Goths.  Especially interesting to
+us English should their fortunes be, for they are said to be very
+near of kin to us; at least to those Jutes who conquered Kent.  As
+Goths, Geats, Getae, Juts, antiquarians find them in early and
+altogether mythic times, in the Scandinavian peninsula, and the isles
+and mainland of Denmark.
+
+Their name, it is said, is the same as one name for the Supreme
+Being.  Goth, Guth, Yuth, signifies war.  'God' is the highest
+warrior, the Lord of hosts, and the progenitor of the race, whether
+as an 'Eponym hero' or as the supreme Deity.  Physical force was
+their rude notion of Divine power, and Tiu, Tiv, or Tyr, in like
+manner, who was originally the god of the clear sky, the Zeus or Jove
+of the Greeks and Romans, became by virtue of his warlike character,
+identical with the Roman Mars, till the dies Martis of the Roman week
+became the German Tuesday.
+
+Working their way down from Gothland and Jutland, we know not why nor
+when, thrusting aside the cognate Burgunds, and the Sclavonic tribes
+whom they met on the road, they had spread themselves, in the third
+century, over the whole South of Russia, and westward over the
+Danubian Provinces, and Hungary.  The Ostrogoths (East-goths) lay
+from the Volga to the Borysthenes, the Visigoths (West-goths?) from
+the Borysthenes to the Theiss.  Behind them lay the Gepidae, a German
+tribe, who had come south-eastward with them, and whose name is said
+to signify the men who had 'bided' (remained) behind the rest.
+
+What manner of men they were it is hard to say, so few details are
+left to us.  But we may conceive them as a tall, fair-haired people,
+clothed in shirts and smocks of embroidered linen, and gaiters cross-
+strapped with hide; their arms and necks encircled with gold and
+silver rings; the warriors, at least of the upper class, well horsed,
+and armed with lance and heavy sword, with chain-mail, and helmets
+surmounted with plumes, horns, towers, dragons, boars, and the other
+strange devices which are still seen on the crests of German nobles.
+This much we can guess; for in this way their ancestors, or at least
+relations, the War-Geats, appear clothed in the grand old song of
+Beowulf.  Their land must have been tilled principally by slaves,
+usually captives taken in war:  but the noble mystery of the forge,
+where arms and ornaments were made, was an honourable craft for men
+of rank; and their ladies, as in the middle age, prided themselves on
+their skill with the needle and the loom.  Their language has been
+happily preserved to us in Ulfilas' Translation of the Scriptures.
+For these Goths, the greater number of them at least, were by this
+time Christians, or very nearly such.  Good Bishop Ulfilas, brought
+up a Christian and consecrated by order of Constantine the Great, had
+been labouring for years to convert his adopted countrymen from the
+worship of Thor and Woden.  He had translated the Bible for them, and
+had constructed a Gothic alphabet for that purpose.  He had omitted,
+however (prudently as he considered) the books of Kings, with their
+histories of the Jewish wars.  The Goths, he held, were only too fond
+of fighting already, and 'needed in that matter the bit, rather than
+the spur.'  He had now a large number of converts, some of whom had
+even endured persecution from their heathen brethren.  Athanaric,
+'judge,' or alderman of the Thervings, had sent through the camp--so
+runs the story--the waggon which bore the idol of Woden, and had
+burnt, with their tents and their families, those who refused to
+worship.
+
+They, like all other German tribes, were ruled over by two royal
+races, sons of Woden and the Asas.  The Ostrogoth race was the
+Amalungs--the 'heavenly,' or 'spotless' race; the Visigoth race was
+the Balthungs--the 'bold' or 'valiant' race; and from these two
+families, and from a few others, but all believed to be lineally
+descended from Woden, and now much intermixed, are derived all the
+old royal families of Europe, that of the House of Brunswick among
+the rest.
+
+That they were no savages, is shewn sufficiently by their names, at
+least those of their chiefs.  Such names as Alaric, 'all rich' or
+'all powerful,' Ataulf, 'the helping father,' Fridigern, 'the willing
+peace-maker,' and so forth--all the names in fact, which can be put
+back into their native form out of their Romanized distortions, are
+tokens of a people far removed from that barbarous state in which men
+are named after personal peculiarities, natural objects, or the
+beasts of the field.  On this subject you may consult, as full of
+interest and instruction, the list of Teutonic names given in
+Muratori.
+
+They had broken over the Roman frontier more than once, and taken
+cities.  They had compelled the Emperor Gratian to buy them off.
+They had built themselves flat-bottomed boats without iron in them
+and sailed from the Crimea round the shores of the Black Sea, once
+and again, plundering Trebizond, and at last the temple itself of
+Diana at Ephesus.  They had even penetrated into Greece and Athens,
+plundered the Parthenon, and threatened the capitol.  They had fought
+the Emperor Decius, till he, and many of his legionaries, were
+drowned in a bog in the moment of victory.  They had been driven with
+difficulty back across the Danube by Aurelian, and walled out of the
+Empire with the Allemanni by Probus's 'Teufels-Mauer,' stretching
+from the Danube to the Rhine.  Their time was not yet come by a
+hundred years.  But they had seen and tasted the fine things of the
+sunny south, and did not forget them amid the steppes and snows.
+
+At last a sore need came upon them.  About 350 there was a great king
+among them, Ermanaric, 'the powerful warrior,' comparable, says
+Jornandes, to Alexander himself, who had conquered all the conquered
+tribes around.  When he was past 100 years old, a chief of the
+Roxolani (Ugrians, according to Dr. Latham; men of Ros, or Russia),
+one of these tribes, plotted against him, and sent for help to the
+new people, the Huns, who had just appeared on the confines of Europe
+and Asia.  Old Ermanaric tore the traitor's wife to pieces with wild
+horses:  but the Huns came nevertheless.  A magic hind, the Goths
+said, guided the new people over the steppes to the land of the
+Goths, and then vanished.  They fought with the Goths, and defeated
+them.  Old Ermanaric stabbed himself for shame, and the hearts of the
+Goths became as water before the tempest of nations.  They were
+supernatural creatures, the Goths believed, engendered of witches and
+demons on the steppes; pig-eyed hideous beings, with cakes instead of
+faces, 'offam magis quam faciem,' under ratskin caps, armed with
+arrows tipped with bone, and lassos of cord, eating, marketing,
+sleeping on horseback, so grown into the saddle that they could
+hardly walk in their huge boots.  With them were Acatzirs, painted
+blue, hair as well as skin; Alans, wandering with their waggons like
+the Huns, armed with heavy cuirasses of plaited horn, their horses
+decked with human scalps; Geloni armed with a scythe, wrapt in a
+cloak of human skin; Bulgars who impaled their prisoners--savages
+innumerable as the locust swarms.  Who could stand against them?
+
+In the year 375, the West Goths came down to the Danube-bank and
+entreated the Romans to let them cross.  There was a Christian party
+among them, persecuted by the heathens, and hoping for protection
+from Rome.  Athanaric had vowed never to set foot on Roman soil, and
+after defending himself against the Huns, retired into the forests of
+'Caucaland.'  Good Bishop Ulfilas and his converts looked longingly
+toward the Christian Empire.  Surely the Christians would receive
+them as brothers, welcome them, help them.  The simple German fancied
+a Roman even such a one as themselves.
+
+Ulfilas went on embassy to Antioch, to Valens the Emperor.  Valens,
+low-born, cruel, and covetous, was an Arian, and could not lose the
+opportunity of making converts.  He sent theologians to meet Ulfilas,
+and torment him into Arianism.  When he arrived, Valens tormented him
+himself.  While the Goths starved he argued, apostasy was the
+absolute condition of his help, till Ulfilas, in a weak moment, gave
+his word that the Goths should become Arians, if Valens would give
+them lands on the South bank of the Danube.  Then they would be the
+Emperor's men, and guard the marches against all foes.  From that
+time Arianism became the creed, not only of the Goths, but of the
+Vandals, the Sueves, and almost all the Teutonic tribes.
+
+It was (if the story be true) a sinful and foolish compact, forced
+from a good man by the sight of his countrymen's extreme danger and
+misery.  It avenged itself, soon enough, upon both Goths and Romans.
+
+To the Goths themselves the change must have seemed not only
+unimportant, but imperceptible.  Unaccustomed to that accuracy of
+thought, which is too often sneered at by Gibbon as 'metaphysical
+subtlety,' all of which they would have been aware was the change of
+a few letters in a creed written in an unknown tongue.  They could
+not know, (Ulfilas himself could not have known, only two years after
+the death of St. Athanasius at Alexandria; while the Nicaean Creed
+was as yet received by only half of the Empire; and while he
+meanwhile had been toiling for years in the Danubian wilds, ignorant
+perhaps of the controversy which had meanwhile convulsed the Church)-
+-neither the Goths nor he, I say, could have known that the Arianism,
+which they embraced, was really the last, and as it were apologetic,
+refuge of dying Polytheism; that it, and not the Catholic Faith,
+denied the abysmal unity of the Godhead; that by making the Son
+inferior to the Father, as touching his Godhead, it invented two
+Gods, a greater and a lesser, thus denying the absoluteness, the
+infinity, the illimitability, by any category of quantity, of that
+One Eternal, of whom it is written, that God is a Spirit.  Still less
+could they have guessed that when Arius, the handsome popular
+preacher (whose very name, perhaps, Ulfilas never heard) asked the
+fine ladies of Alexandria--'Had you a son before that son was born?'-
+-'No.'  'Then God could have no son before that son was begotten,
+&c.'--that he was mingling up the idea of Time with the idea of that
+Eternal God who created Time, and debasing to the accidents of before
+and after that Timeless and Eternal Generation, of which it is
+written, 'Thou art my Son, this day have I begotten thee.'  Still
+less could Ulfilas, or his Goths, have known, that the natural human
+tendency to condition God by Time, would be, in later ages, even long
+after Arianism was crushed utterly, the parent of many a cruel,
+gross, and stupid superstition.  To them it would have been a mere
+question whether Woden, the All-father, was superior to one of his
+sons, the Asas:  and the Catholic faith probably seemed to them an
+impious assumption of equality, on the part of one of those Asas,
+with Woden himself.
+
+Of the battle between Arianism and Orthodoxy I have said enough to
+shew you that I think it an internecine battle between truth and
+falsehood.  But it has been long ago judged by wager of battle:  by
+the success of that duel of time, of which we must believe (as our
+forefathers believed of all fair duels) that God defends the right.
+
+So the Goths were to come over the Danube stream:  but they must give
+up their arms, and deliver their children (those of rank, one
+supposes), as hostages, to be educated by the Romans, as Romans.
+
+They crossed the fatal river; they were whole days in crossing; those
+set to count them gave it up in despair; Ammianus says:  'He who
+wishes to know their number,'
+
+
+   'Libyci velit aequoris idem
+Discere quam multae Zephyro volvuntur arenae.'
+
+
+And when they were across, they gave up the children.  They had not
+the heart to give up the beloved weapons.  The Roman commissioners
+let them keep the arms, at the price of many a Gothic woman's honour.
+Ugly and foul things happened, of which we have only hints.  Then
+they had to be fed for the time being, till they could cultivate
+their land.  Lupicinus and Maximus, the two governors of Thrace
+pocketed the funds which Valens sent, and starved the Goths.  The
+markets were full of carrion and dogs' flesh.  Anything was good
+enough for a barbarian.  Their fringed carpets, their beautiful
+linens, all went.  A little wholesome meat cost 10 pounds of silver.
+When all was gone, they had to sell their children.  To establish a
+slave-trade in the beautiful boys and girls was just what the wicked
+Romans wanted.
+
+At last the end came.  They began to rise.  Fridigern, their king,
+kept them quiet till the time was ripe for revenge.  The Romans,
+trying to keep the West Goths down, got so confused, it seems, that
+they let the whole nation of the East Goths (of whom we shall hear
+more hereafter) dash across the Danube, and establish themselves in
+the north of the present Turkey, to the east of the West Goths.
+
+Then at Marcianopolis, the capital of Lower Moesia, Lupicinus asked
+Fridigern and his chiefs to a feast.  The starving Goths outside were
+refused supplies from the market, and came to blows with the guards.
+Lupicinus, half drunk, heard of it, and gave orders for a massacre.
+Fridigern escaped from the palace, sword in hand.  The smouldering
+embers burst into flame, the war-cry was raised, and the villain
+Lupicinus fled for his life.
+
+Then began war south of the Danube.  The Roman legions were defeated
+by the Goths, who armed themselves with the weapons of the dead.
+Moesia was overrun with fire and sword.  Adrianople was attacked, but
+in vain.  The slaves in the gold mines were freed from their misery,
+and shewed the Goths the mountain-passes and the stores of grain.  As
+they went on, the Goths recovered their children.  The poor things
+told horrid tales; and the Goths, maddened, avenged themselves on the
+Romans of every age and sex.  'They left,' says St. Jerome, 'nothing
+alive--not even the beasts of the field; till nothing was left but
+growing brambles and thick forests.'
+
+Valens, the Emperor, was at Antioch.  Now he hurried to
+Constantinople, but too late.  The East Goths had joined the West
+Goths; and hordes of Huns, Alans, and Taifalae (detestable savages,
+of whom we know nothing but evil) had joined Fridigern's confederacy.
+
+Gratian, Valens' colleague and nephew, son of Valentinian the bear-
+ward, had just won a great victory over the Allemanni at Colmar in
+Alsace; and Valens was jealous of his glory.  He is said to have been
+a virtuous youth, whose monomania was shooting.  He fell in love with
+the wild Alans, in spite of their horse-trappings of scalps, simply
+because of their skill in archery; formed a body-guard of them, and
+passed his time hunting with them round Paris.  Nevertheless, he won
+this great victory by the help, it seems, of one Count Ricimer
+('ever-powerful'), Count of the Domestics, whose name proclaims him a
+German.
+
+Valens was jealous of Gratian's fame; he was stung by the reproaches
+of the mob of Constantinople; and he undervalued the Goths, on
+account of some successes of his lieutenants, who had recovered much
+of the plunder taken by them, and had utterly overpowered the foul
+Taifalae, transporting them to lands about Modena and Parma in Italy.
+He rejected Count Ricimer's advice to wait till Gratian reinforced
+him with the victorious western legions, and determined to give
+battle a few miles from Adrianople.  Had he waited for Gratian, the
+history of the whole world might have been different.
+
+For on the ninth of August, A.D. 378, the fatal day, the second
+Cannae, from which Rome never recovered as from that first, the young
+world and the old world met, and fought it out; and the young world
+won.  The light Roman cavalry fled before the long lances and heavy
+swords of the German knights.  The knights turned on the infantry,
+broke them, hunted them down by charge after charge, and left the
+footmen to finish the work.
+
+Two-thirds of the Roman army were destroyed; four Counts of the
+Empire; generals and officers without number.  Valens fled wounded to
+a cottage.  The Goths set it on fire, and burned him and his staff
+therein, ignorant that they had in their hands the Emperor of Rome.
+Verily there is a God who judgeth the earth.
+
+So thought the Catholics of that day, who saw in the fearful death of
+Valens a punishment for his having forced the Goths to become Arians.
+'It was just,' says one, 'that he should burn on earth, by whose
+counsels so many barbarians will burn in hell for ever.'  There are
+(as I have shewn) still darker counts in the conduct of the Romans
+toward the Goths; enough (if we believe our Bibles) to draw down on
+the guilty the swift and terrible judgments of God.
+
+At least, this was the second Cannae, the death-wound of Rome.  From
+that day the end was certain, however slow.  The Teuton had at last
+tried his strength against the Roman.  The wild forest-child had
+found himself suddenly at death-grips with the Enchanter whom he had
+feared, and almost worshipped, for so long; and behold, to his own
+wonder, he was no more a child, but grown into a man, and the
+stronger, if not the cunninger of the two.  There had been a spell
+upon him; the 'Romani nominis umbra.'  But from that day the spell
+was broken.  He had faced a Roman Emperor, a Divus Caesar, the man-
+god by whose head all nations swore, rich with the magic wealth, wise
+with the magic cunning, of centuries of superhuman glory; and he had
+killed him, and behold he died, like other men.  That he had done.
+What was there left for him now that he could not do?
+
+The stronger he was, but not yet the cunninger of the two.  The Goths
+could do no more.  They had to leave Adrianople behind them, with the
+Emperor's treasures safe within its walls; to gaze with childish
+wonder at the Bosphorus and its palaces; to recoil in awe from the
+'long walls' of Constantinople, and the great stones which the
+engines thereon hurled at them by 'arsmetricke and nigromancy,' as
+their descendants believed of the Roman mechanicians, even five
+hundred years after; to hear (without being able to avenge) the
+horrible news, that the Gothic lads distributed throughout Asia, to
+be educated as Romans, had been decoyed into the cities by promises
+of lands and honours, and then massacred in cold blood; and then to
+settle down, leaving their children unavenged, for twenty years on
+the rich land which we now call Turkey in Europe, waiting till the
+time was come.
+
+Waiting, I say, till the time was come.  The fixed idea that Rome, if
+not Constantinople, could be taken at last, probably never left the
+minds of the leading Goths after the battle of Adrianople.  The
+altered policy of the Caesars was enough of itself to keep that idea
+alive.  So far from expelling them from the country which they had
+seized, the new Emperor began to flatter and to honour them.
+
+They had been heretofore regarded as savages, either to be driven
+back by main force, or tempted to enlist in the Roman ranks.
+Theodosius regarded them as a nation, and one which it was his
+interest to hire, to trust, to indulge at the expense of his Roman
+subjects.
+
+Theodosius has received the surname of Great--seemingly by
+comparison; 'Inter caecos luscus rex;' and it was highly creditable
+to a Roman Emperor in those days to be neither ruffian nor villain,
+but a handsome, highbred, courteous gentleman, pure in his domestic
+life, an orthodox Christian, and sufficiently obedient to the Church
+to forgive the monks who had burnt a Jewish synagogue, and to do
+penance in the Cathedral of Milan for the massacre of Thessalonica.
+That the morals of the Empire (if Zosimus is to be at all believed)
+grew more and more effeminate, corrupt, reckless; that the soldiers
+(if Vegetius is to be believed) actually laid aside, by royal
+permission, their helmets and cuirasses, as too heavy for their
+degenerate bodies; that the Roman heavy infantry, which had conquered
+the world, ceased to exist, while its place was taken by that
+Teutonic heavy cavalry, which decided every battle in Europe till the
+English yeoman, at Crecy and Poictiers, turned again the balance of
+arms in favour of the men who fought on foot; that the Goths became
+the 'foederati' or allies of the Empire, paid to fight its battles
+against Maximus the Spaniard, and Arbogast the Frank, the rebels who,
+after the murder of young Gratian, attempted to set up a separate
+empire in the west; that Stilicho the Vandal was the Emperor's
+trusted friend, and master of the horse; that Alaric the Balth, and
+other noble Goths, were learning to combine with their native courage
+those Roman tactics which they only needed to become masters of the
+world; that in all cities, even in the Royal Palace, the huge Goth
+swaggered in Roman costume, his neck and arms heavy with golden torcs
+and bracelets; or even (as in the case of Fravitta and Priulf)
+stabbed his enemy with impunity at the imperial table; that [Greek
+text which cannot be reproduced], to disturb the Goths, was a deadly
+offence throughout the Empire:  all these things did not prevent a
+thousand new statues from rising in honour of the great Caesar, and
+excited nothing more than grumblings of impotent jealousy from a
+people whose maxim had become, 'Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow
+we die.'
+
+Three anecdotes will illustrate sufficiently the policy of Theodosius
+toward his inconvenient guests.  Towards the beginning of his reign,
+when the Goths, after the death of the great Fridigern, were broken
+up, and quarreling among themselves, he tempted a royal Amal, Modar
+by name, by the title of Master-General, to attack and slaughter in
+their sleep a rival tribe of Goths, and carry off an immense spoil to
+the imperial camp.  To destroy the German by the German was so old a
+method of the Roman policy, that it was not considered derogatory to
+the 'greatness' of Theodosius.
+
+The old Athanaric, the Therving--he who had sworn never to set foot
+on Roman soil, and had burnt them who would not fall down and worship
+before Woden's waggon, came over the Danube, out of the forests of
+'Caucaland,' and put himself at the head of the Goths.  The great
+Caesar trembled before the heathen hero; and they made peace
+together; and old Athanaric went to him at Constantinople, and they
+became as friends.  And the Romani nominis umbra, the glamour of the
+Roman name, fell on the old man, too feeble now to fight; and as he
+looked, says Jornandes, on the site of the city, and on the fleets of
+ships, and the world-famous walls, and the people from all the
+nations upon earth, he said, 'Now I behold what I have often heard
+tell, and never believed.  The Kaiser is a God on earth, and he who
+shall lift his hand against him, is guilty of his own blood.'  The
+old hero died in Constantinople, and the really good-natured Emperor
+gave him a grand funeral, and a statue, and so delighted the simple
+Goths, that the whole nation entered his service bodily, and became
+the Emperor's men.
+
+The famous massacre of Thessalonica, and the penance of Theodosius,
+immortalized by the pencil of Vandyke, is another significant example
+of the relation between Goth and Roman.  One Botheric (a Vandal or
+other Teuton by his name) was military commandant of that important
+post.  He put in prison a popular charioteer of the circus, for a
+crime for which the Teutonic language had to borrow a foreign name,
+and which the Teutons, like ourselves, punished with death, though it
+was committed with impunity in any Roman city.  At the public games,
+the base mob clamoured, but in vain, for the release of their
+favourite; and not getting him, rose on Botheric, murdered him and
+his officers, and dragged their corpses through the streets.
+
+This was indeed [Greek text which cannot be reproduced]; and
+Theodosius, partly in honest indignation, partly perhaps in fear of
+the consequences, issued orders from Milan which seem to have
+amounted to a permission to the Goths to avenge themselves.  The
+populace were invited as usual to the games of the circus, and
+crowded in, forgetful of their crime, heedless of danger, absorbed in
+the one greed of frivolous, if not sinful pleasure.  The Gothic
+troops concealed around entered, and then began a 'murder grim and
+great.'  For three hours it lasted.  Every age and sex, innocent or
+guilty, native or foreigner, to the number of at least 7,000,
+perished, or are said to have perished; and the soul of Botheric had
+'good company on its way to Valhalla.'
+
+The Goths, doubtless, considered that they were performing an act of
+public justice upon villains:  but the Bishops of the Church looked
+at the matter in another light.  The circumstances of treachery, the
+confusion of the innocent with the guilty, the want of any judicial
+examination and sentence, aroused their sense of humanity and
+justice.  The offence was aggravated by the thought that the victims
+were Roman and orthodox, the murderers barbarians and Arians; St.
+Ambrose, with a noble courage, stopped the Emperor at the door of the
+Basilica of Milan, and forbad him to enter, till he had atoned for
+the fatal order by public penance.  The Caesar submitted nobly to the
+noble demand; and the repentance of Theodosius is the last scene in
+the downward career of the Caesars, which can call forth a feeling of
+admiration and respect.
+
+In January 395 Theodosius died; and after him came the deluge.
+
+The Empire was parted between his two worthless sons.  Honorius had
+the west, Arcadius the east; while the real master of the Empire was
+Stilicho the Vandal, whose virtues and valour and mighty stature are
+sung (and not undeservedly) in the pompous verses of Claudian.  Of
+the confusion which ensued; of the murder (well-deserved) of Rufinus,
+the infamous minister whose devout hypocrisy had so long cajoled
+Theodosius; of the revolt and atrocities of Gildo in Africa, you must
+read in the pages of Gibbon.  These lectures confine themselves, at
+present, to the history of the Goths.
+
+In January 395, I said, Theodosius died.  Before the end of the
+winter the Goths were in arms, with Alaric the Balth at their head.
+They had been refused, at least for the time, the payment of their
+usual subsidy.  He had been refused the command of the Roman armies.
+Any excuse was sufficient.  The fruit was ripe for plucking.  The
+wrongs of centuries were to be avenged.  Other tribes crost the
+Danube on the ice, and joined the Goths; and the mighty host swept
+down through Greece, passing Thermopylae unopposed, ransoming Athens
+(where Alaric enjoyed a Greek bath and a public banquet, and tried to
+behave for a day like a Roman gentleman); sacking Corinth, Argos,
+Sparta, and all the cities and villages far and wide, and carrying
+off plunder inestimable, and troops of captive women.
+
+Stilicho threw himself into the Peloponnese at Corinth to cut off the
+Goths, and after heavy fighting, Alaric, who seems to have been a
+really great general, out-manoeuvred him, crost the Gulf of Corinth
+at Rhium, with all his plunder and captives, and got safe away into
+northern Greece.
+
+There Arcadius, the terrified Emperor of the East, punished him for
+having devastated Greece, by appointing him Master-General of the
+very country which he had ravaged.  The end was coming very near.
+The Goths lifted him on the shield, and proclaimed him King of the
+West Goths; and there he staid, somewhere about the head of the
+Adriatic, poised like an eagle in mid-air, watching Rome on one side,
+and Byzant on the other, uncertain on which quarry he should swoop.
+
+He made up his mind for Rome.  He would be the man to do the deed at
+last.  There was a saga in which he trusted.  Claudian gives it in an
+hexameter,
+
+
+'Alpibus Italiae ruptis penetrabis ad urbem.'
+
+
+Yes, he would take The City, and avenge the treachery of Valens, and
+all the wrongs which Teutons had endured from the Romans for now four
+centuries.  And he did it.
+
+But not the first time.  He swept over the Alps.  Honorius fled to
+Asta, and Alaric besieged him there.  The faithful Stilicho came to
+the rescue; and Alaric was driven to extremities.  His warriors
+counselled him to retreat.  No, he would take Rome, or die.  But at
+Pollentia, Stilicho surprised him, while he and his Goths were
+celebrating Easter Sunday, and a fearful battle followed.  The Romans
+stormed his camp, recovered the spoils of Greece, and took his wife,
+decked in the jewels in which she meant to enter Rome.  One longs to
+know what became of her.
+
+At least, so say the Romans:  the Goths tell a very different story;
+and one suspects that Pollentia may be one more of those splendid
+paper victories, in which the Teutons were utterly exterminated, only
+to rise out of the ground, seemingly stronger and more numerous than
+ever.  At least, instead of turning his head to the Alps, he went on
+toward Rome.  Stilicho dared not fight him again, and bought him off.
+He turned northward toward Gaul, and at Verona Stilicho got him at an
+advantage, and fought him once more, and if we are to believe Rosino
+and Claudian, beat him again.  'Taceo de Alarico, saepe victo, saepe
+concluso, semperque dimisso.'  'It is ill work trapping an eagle,'
+says some one.  When you have caught him, the safest thing very often
+is to let him go again.
+
+Meanwhile poured down into Italy, as far as Florence (a merely
+unimportant episode in those fearful days), another wave of German
+invaders under one Radogast, 200,000 strong.  Under the walls of
+Florence they sat down, and perished of wine, and heat, and
+dysentery.  Like water they flowed in, and like water they sank into
+the soil:  and every one of them a human soul.
+
+Stilicho and Honorius went to Rome, and celebrated their triumph over
+the Goths, with (for the last time in history) gladiatorial sports.
+Three years past, and then Stilicho was duly rewarded for having
+saved Rome, in the approved method for every great barbarian who was
+fool enough to help the treacherous Roman; namely, by being murdered.
+
+Alaric rose instantly, and with him all the Gothic tribes.  Down
+through Italy he past, almost without striking a blow.  Ravenna,
+infamous, according to Sidonius, for its profligacy, where the
+Emperor's court was, he past disdainfully, and sat down before the
+walls of Rome.  He did not try to storm it.  Probably he could not.
+He had no such machines, as those with which the Romans battered
+walls.  Quietly he sat, he and his Goths, 'as wolves wait round the
+dying buffalo;' waiting for the Romans within to starve and die.
+They did starve and die; men murdered each other for food; mothers
+ate their own babes; but they sent out embassies, boasting of their
+strength and numbers.  Alaric laughed,--'The thicker the hay, the
+easier it is mowed.'  What terms would he take?  'All your gold, all
+your silver, the best of your precious things.  All your barbarian
+slaves.'  That last is significant.  He would deliver his own flesh
+and blood.  The Teuton man should be free.  The trolls should drag no
+more of the forest children into their accursed den.  'What then will
+you leave us?'  'Your lives.'
+
+They bought him off with a quaint ransom:  5000 pounds weight of
+gold, 30,000 of silver, 4000 robes of silk, 3000 pieces of scarlet
+cloth, and 3000 lbs. of pepper, possibly spices of all kinds.  Gold,
+and finery, and spices--gifts fit for children, such as those Goths
+were.
+
+But he got, too, 40,000 Teuton slaves safe out of the evil place, and
+embodied them into his army.  He had now 100,000 fighting men.  Why
+did he not set up as king of Italy?  Was it that the awe of the
+place, the prestige of the Roman name, cowed him?  It cowed each of
+the Teutonic invaders successively.  To make themselves emperors of
+Rome was a thing of which they dared not dream.  Be that as it may,
+all he asked was, to be received as some sort of vassal of the
+Emperor.  The Master-Generalship of Italy, subsidies for his army, an
+independent command in the Tyrolese country, whence he had come, were
+his demand.
+
+Overblown with self-conceit, the Romans refused him.  They would
+listen to no conditions.  They were in a thoroughly Chinese temper.
+You will find the Byzantine empire in the same temper centuries
+after; blinded to present weakness by the traditions of their
+forefathers' strength.  They had worshipped the beast.  Now that only
+his image was left, they worshipped that.
+
+Alaric seized Ostia, and cut off their supplies.  They tried to
+appease him by dethroning Honorius, and setting up some puppet
+Attalus.  Alaric found him plotting; or said that he had done so; and
+degraded him publicly at Rimini before his whole army.  Again he
+offered peace.  The insane Romans proclaimed that his guilt precluded
+him for ever from the clemency of the Empire.
+
+Then came the end.  He marched on Rome.  The Salarian gate was thrown
+open at midnight, probably by German slaves within; and then, for
+five dreadful days and nights, the wicked city expiated in agony the
+sins of centuries.
+
+And so at last the Nibelungen hoard was won.
+
+'And the kings of the earth who had lived delicately with her, and
+the merchants of the earth who were made rich by her, bewailed her,
+standing afar off for the fear of her torment, and crying, Alas!
+alas, that great Babylon! for in one hour is thy judgment come.'
+
+St. John passes in those words from the region of symbol to that of
+literal description.  A great horror fell upon all nations, when the
+news came.  Rome taken?  Surely the end of all things was at hand.
+The wretched fugitives poured into Egypt and Syria--especially to
+Jerusalem; perhaps with some superstitious hope that Christ's tomb,
+or even Christ himself, might save them.
+
+St. Jerome, as he saw day by day patrician men and women who had
+passed their lives in luxury, begging their bread around his
+hermitage at Bethlehem, wrote of the fall of Rome as a man astonied.
+
+St. Augustine, at Hippo, could only look on it as the end of all
+human power and glory, perhaps of the earth itself.  Babylon the
+great had fallen, and now Christ was coming in the clouds of heaven
+to set up the city of God for ever.  In that thought he wrote his De
+Civitate Dei.  Read it, gentlemen--especially you who are to be
+priests--not merely for its details of the fall of Rome, but as the
+noblest theodicy which has yet proceeded from a human pen.
+
+Followed by long trains of captives, long trains of waggons bearing
+the spoils of all the world, Alaric went on South, 'with the native
+instinct of the barbarian,' as Dr. Sheppard well says.  Always toward
+the sun.  Away from Muspelheim and the dark cold north, toward the
+sun, and Valhalla, where Odin and the Asas dwell in everlasting
+light.
+
+He tried to cross into Sicily:  but a storm wrecked his boats, and
+the Goths were afraid of the sea.  And after a while he died.  And
+the wild men made a great mourning over him.  They had now no plan
+left; no heart to go south, and look for Odin over the sea.  But of
+one thing they were resolved, that the base Romans should not dig up
+Alaric out of his barrow and scatter his bones to the winds.
+
+So they put no barrow over the great king; but under the walls of
+Cosenza they turned the river-bed, and in that river-bed they set
+Alaric, armed and mailed, upright upon his horse, with gold, and
+jewels, and arms, and it may be captive youths and maids, that he
+might enter into Valhalla in royal pomp, and make a worthy show among
+the heroes in Odin's hall.  And then they turned back the river into
+its bed, and slew the slaves who had done the work, that no man might
+know where Alaric lies:  and no man does know till this day.
+
+As I said, they had no plan left now.  Two years they stayed in
+Campania, basking in the villas and gardens, drinking their fill of
+the wine; and then flowed away northward again, no one knows why.
+They had no wish to settle, as they might have done.  They followed
+some God-given instinct, undiscoverable now by us.  Ataulf, Alaric's
+kinsman, married Placidia, the Emperor's beautiful young sister, and
+accepted from him some sort of commission to fight against his
+enemies in Gaul.  So to the south of Gaul they went, and then into
+Spain, crushing before them Alans, Sueves, and Vandals, and
+quarrelling among themselves.  Ataulf was murdered, and all his
+children; Placidia put to shame.  Then she had her revenge.  To me it
+is not so much horrible as pitiful.  They had got the Nibelungen
+hoard; and with it the Nibelungen curse.
+
+A hundred years afterwards, when the Franks pillaged the Gothic
+palace of Narbonne, they found the remnants of it.  Things
+inestimable, indescribable; tables of solid emerald; the Missorium, a
+dish 2500 lbs. weight, covered with all the gems of India.  They had
+been in Solomon's Temple, fancied the simple Franks--as indeed some
+of them may well have been.  The Arabs got the great emerald table at
+last, with its three rows of great pearls.  Where are they all now?
+What is become, gentlemen, of the treasures of Rome?  Jewels,
+recollect, are all but indestructible; recollect, too, that vast
+quantities were buried from time to time, and their places forgotten.
+Perhaps future generations will discover many such hoards.
+Meanwhile, many of those same jewels must be in actual use even now.
+Many a gem which hangs now on an English lady's wrist saw Alaric sack
+Rome--and saw before and since--What not?  The palaces of the
+Pharaohs, or of Darius; then the pomp of the Ptolemies, or of the
+Seleucids--came into Europe on the neck of some vulgar drunken wife
+of a Roman proconsul, to glitter for a few centuries at every
+gladiator's butchery in the amphitheatre; then went away with
+Placidia on a Gothic ox-waggon, to pass into an Arab seraglio at
+Seville; and then, perhaps, back from Sultan to Sultan again to its
+native India, to figure in the peacock-throne of the Great Mogul, and
+be bought at last by some Armenian for a few rupees from an English
+soldier, and come hither--and whither next?  When England shall be
+what Alexandria and Rome are now, that little stone will be as bright
+as ever.--An awful symbol, if you will take it so, of the permanence
+of God's works and God's laws, amid the wild chance and change of
+sinful man.
+
+Then followed for Rome years of peace,--such peace as the wicked make
+for themselves--A troubled sea, casting up mire and dirt.  Wicked
+women, wicked counts (mayors of the palace, one may call them) like
+Aetius and Boniface, the real rulers of a nominal Empire.
+
+Puppet Valentinian succeeded his father, puppet Honorius.  In his
+days appeared another great portent--another comet, sweeping down out
+of infinite space, and back into infinite space again.--Attila and
+his Huns.  They lay in innumerable hordes upon the Danube, until
+Honoria, Valentinian's sister, confined in a convent at
+Constantinople for some profligacy, sent her ring to Attila.  He must
+be her champion, and deliver her.  He paused a while, like Alaric
+before him, doubting whether to dash on Constantinople or Rome, and
+at last decided for Rome.  But he would try Gaul first; and into Gaul
+he poured, with all his Tartar hordes, and with them all the Teuton
+tribes, who had gathered in his progress, as an avalanche gathers the
+snow in its course.  At the great battle of Chalons, in the year 451,
+he fought it out:  Hun, Sclav, Tartar, and Finn, backed by Teutonic
+Gepid and Herule, Turkling, East Goth and Lombard, against Roman and
+West Goth, Frank and Burgund, and the Bretons of Armorica.  Wicked
+Aetius shewed himself that day, as always, a general and a hero--the
+Marlborough of his time--and conquered.  Attila and his hordes rolled
+away eastward, and into Italy for Rome.
+
+That is the Hunnenschlacht; 'a battle,' as Jornandes calls it,
+'atrox, multiplex, immane, pertinax.'  Antiquity, he says, tells of
+nothing like it.  No man who had lost that sight could say that he
+had seen aught worth seeing.--A fight gigantic, supernatural in
+vastness and horror, and the legends which still hang about the
+place.  You may see one of them in Von Kaulbach's immortal design--
+the ghosts of the Huns and the ghosts of the Germans rising from
+their graves on the battle-night in every year, to fight it over
+again in the clouds, while the country far and wide trembles at their
+ghostly hurrah.  No wonder men remember that Hunnenschlacht.  Many
+consider that it saved Europe; that it was one of the decisive
+battles of the world.
+
+Not that Attila was ruined.  Within the year he had swept through
+Germany, crossed the Alps, and devastated Italy almost to the walls
+of Rome.  And there the great Pope Leo, 'the Cicero of preaching, the
+Homer of theology, the Aristotle of true philosophy,' met the wild
+heathen:  and a sacred horror fell upon Attila, and he turned, and
+went his way, to die a year or two after no man knows how.  Over and
+above his innumerable wives, he took a beautiful German girl.  When
+his people came in the morning, the girl sat weeping, or seeming to
+weep; but Etzel, the scourge of God, lay dead in a pool of gore.  She
+said that he had burst a blood-vessel.  The Teutons whispered among
+themselves, that like a free-born Teuton, she had slain her tyrant.
+One longs to know what became of her.
+
+And then the hordes broke up.  Ardarich raised the Teuton Gepids and
+Ostrogoths.  The Teutons who had obeyed Attila, turned on their
+Tartar conquerors, the only people who had ever subdued German men,
+and then only by brute force of overpowering numbers.  At Netad, upon
+the great plain between the Drave and the Danube, they fought the
+second Hunnenschlacht, and the Germans conquered.  Thirty thousand
+Huns fell on that dreadful day, and the rest streamed away into the
+heart of Asia, into the infinite unknown deserts from whence the foul
+miscreants had streamed forth, and left the Teutons masters of the
+world.  The battle of Netad; that, and not Chalons, to my mind, was
+the saving battle of Europe.
+
+So Rome was saved; but only for a few years.  Puppet Valentinian
+rewarded Aetius for saving Rome, by stabbing with his own hand in his
+own palace, the hero of Chalons; and then went on to fill up the cup
+of his iniquity.  It is all more like some horrible romance than
+sober history.  Neglecting his own wife Eudoxia, he took it into his
+wicked head to ravish her intimate friend, the wife of a senator.
+Maximus stabbed him, retaliated on the beautiful empress, and made
+himself Emperor.  She sent across the seas to Africa, to Genseric the
+Vandal, the cruel tyrant and persecutor.  He must come and be her
+champion, as Attila had been Honoria's.  And he came, with Vandals,
+Moors, naked Ausurians from the Atlas.  The wretched Romans, in their
+terror, tore Maximus in pieces; but it was too late.  Eudoxia met
+Genseric at the gates in royal robes and jewels.  He stript her of
+her jewels on the spot, and sacked Rome; and that was her reward.
+
+This is the second sack.  More dreadful far than the first--455 is
+its date.  Then it was that the statues, whose fragments are still
+found, were hurled in vain on the barbarian assailants.  Not merely
+gold and jewels, but the art-treasures of Rome were carried off to
+the Vandal fleet, and with them the golden table and the seven-
+branched candlestick which Titus took from the Temple of Jerusalem.
+
+How had these things escaped the Goths forty years before?  We cannot
+tell.  Perhaps the Gothic sack, which only lasted five days, was less
+complete than this one, which went on for fourteen days of
+unutterable horrors.  The plunderers were not this time sturdy honest
+Goths; not even German slaves, mad to revenge themselves on their
+masters:  they were Moors, Ausurian black savages, and all the
+pirates and cut-throats of the Mediterranean.
+
+Sixty thousand prisoners were carried off to Carthage.  All the
+statues were wrecked on the voyage to Africa, and lost for ever.
+
+And yet Rome did not die.  She lingered on; her Emperor still calling
+himself an Emperor, her senate a senate; feeding her lazy plebs, as
+best she could, with the remnant of those revenues which former
+Emperors had set aside for their support--their public bread, public
+pork, public oil, public wine, public baths,--and leaving them to
+gamble and quarrel, and listen to the lawyers in rags and rascality,
+and to rise and murder ruler after ruler, benefactor after
+benefactor, out of base jealousy and fear of any one less base than
+themselves.  And so 'the smoke of her torment went up continually.'
+
+But if Rome would not die, still less would she repent; as it is
+written--'The remnant of the people repented not of their deeds, but
+gnawed their tongues for pain, and blasphemed the God of heaven.'
+
+As the century runs on, the confusion becomes more and more dreadful.
+Anthemius, Olybrius, Orestes, and the other half-caste Romans with
+Greek names who become quasi-emperors and get murdered; Ricimer the
+Sueve, the king-maker and king-murderer; even good Majorian, who as
+puppet Emperor set up by Ricimer, tries to pass a few respectable
+laws, and is only murdered all the sooner.  None of these need detain
+us.  They mean nothing, they represent no idea, they are simply kites
+and crows quarrelling over the carcase, and cannot possibly teach us
+anything, but the terrible lesson, that in all revolutions the worst
+men are certain to rise to the top.
+
+But only for a while, gentlemen, only for a while.  Villany is by its
+very essence self-destructive, and if rogues have their day, the time
+comes when rogues fall out, and honest men come by their own.
+
+That day, however, was not come for wretched Rome.  A third time she
+was sacked by Ricimer her own general; and then more villains ruled
+her; and more kites and crows plundered her.  The last of them only
+need keep us a while.  He is Odoacer, the giant Herule, Houd-y-
+wacker, as some say his name really is, a soubriquet perhaps from his
+war-cry, 'Hold ye stoutly,' 'Stand you steady.'  His father was
+AEdecon, Attila's secretary, chief of the little Turkling tribe, who,
+though Teutonic, had clung faithfully to Attila's sons, and after the
+battle of Netad, came to ruin.  There are strange stories of Odoacer.
+One from the Lives of St. Severinus, how Odoacer and his brothers
+started over the Alps, knapsacks at back, to seek their fortunes in
+Italy, and take service with the Romans; and how they came to St.
+Severinus' cell near Vienna, and went in, heathens as they probably
+were, to get a blessing from the holy hermit; and how Odoacer had to
+stoop, and stand stooping, so huge he was.  And how the saint saw
+that he was no common lad, and said, 'Go into Italy, clothed in thy
+ragged sheep-skins:  thou shalt soon give greater gifts to thy
+friends.'  So he went, and his brother with him.  One of them at
+least ought to interest us.  He was Onulf, Hunwulf, Wulf, Guelph, the
+Wolf-cub, who went away to Constantinople, and saw strange things,
+and did strange things likewise, and at last got back to Germany, and
+settled in Bavaria, and became the ancestor of all the Guelphs, and
+of Victoria, queen of England.  His son, Wulfgang, fought under
+Belisarius against the Goths; his son again, Ulgang, under Belisarius
+against Persian and Lombard; his son or grandson was Queen
+Brunhilda's confidant in France, and became Duke of Burgundy; and
+after that the fortunes of his family were mixed up with the
+Merovingian kings of France, and then again with the Lombards in
+Italy, till one of them emerges as Guelf, count of Altorf, the
+ancestor of our Guelphic line.
+
+But to return to Odoacer.  He came to Rome, seeking his fortune.
+There he found in power Orestes, his father's old colleague at
+Attila's court, the most unprincipled turn-coat of his day; who had
+been the Emperor's man, then Attila's man, and would be anybody's man
+if needed:  but who was now his own man, being king-maker for the
+time being, and father of the puppet Emperor, Romulus Augustulus, a
+pretty little lad, with an ominous name.
+
+Odoacer took service under Orestes in the bodyguards, became a great
+warrior and popular; watched his time; and when Orestes refused the
+mercenaries, Herules, Rugians, Scyrings, Turklings and Alans--all the
+weak or half-caste frontier tribes who had as yet little or no share
+in the spoils of Italy--their demand of the third of the lands of
+Italy, he betrayed his benefactor; promised the mercenaries to do for
+them what Orestes would not, and raises his famous band of
+confederates.  At last he called himself King of Nations, burnt
+Pavia, and murdered Orestes, as a due reward for his benefits.
+Stript of his purple, the last Emperor of Rome knelt crying at the
+feet of the German giant, and begged not to be murdered like his
+father.  And the great wild beast's hard heart smote him, and he sent
+the poor little lad away, to live in wealth and peace in Lucullus'
+villa at Misenum, with plenty of money, and women, and gewgaws, to
+dream away his foolish life looking out over the fair bay of Naples--
+the last Emperor of Rome.
+
+Then Odoacer set to work, and not altogether ill.  He gave his
+confederates the third of Italy, in fief under himself as king, and
+for fourteen years (not without the help of a few more murders) he
+kept some sort of rude order and justice in the wretched land.
+Remember him, for, bad man as he is, he does represent a principle.
+He initiated, by that gift of the lands to his soldiers, the feudal
+system in Italy.  I do not mean that he invented it.  It seems rather
+to be a primaeval German form, as old as the days of Tacitus, who
+describes, if you will recollect, the German war-kings as parting the
+conquered lands among their 'comites,' thanes, or companions in arms.
+
+So we leave Odoacer king of Italy, for fourteen years, little
+dreaming, perhaps, of the day when as he had done unto others so
+should it be done to him.  But for that tale of just and terrible
+retribution you must wait till the next lecture.
+
+And now, to refresh us with a gleam of wholesome humanity after all
+these horrors, let us turn to our worthy West Goth cousins for a
+while.  They have stopt cutting each other's throats, settled
+themselves in North Spain and South France, and good bishop Sidonius
+gets to like them.  They are just and honest men on the whole,
+kindly, and respectable in morals, living according to their strange
+old Gothic Law.  But above all Sidonius likes their king--Theodoric
+is his name.  A man of blood he has been in his youth:  but he has
+settled down, like his people; and here is a picture of him.  A real
+photograph of a live old Goth, nearly 1400 years ago.  Gibbon gives a
+good translation of it.  I will give you one, but Sidonius is prolix
+and florid, and I have had to condense.
+
+A middle-sized, stout man, of great breadth of chest, and thickness
+of limb, a large hand, and a small foot, curly haired, bushy eye-
+browed, with remarkably large eyes and eyelids, hook-nosed, thin-
+lipped; brilliant, cheerful, impassioned, full of health and strength
+in mind and body.  He goes to chapel before day-light, sits till
+eight doing justice, while the crowd, let into a latticed enclosure,
+is admitted one by one behind a curtain into the presence.  At eight
+he leaves the throne, and goes either to count his money, or look at
+his horses.  If he hunts, he thinks it undignified to carry his bow,
+and womanish to keep it strung, a boy carries it behind him; and when
+game gets up, he asks you (or the Bishop, who seems to have gone
+hunting with him) what you would wish him to aim at; strings his bow,
+and then (says Sidonius) never misses his shot.  He dines at noon,
+quietly in general, magnificently on Saturdays; drinks very little,
+and instead of sleeping after dinner, plays at tables and dice.  He
+is passionately fond of his game, but never loses his temper, joking
+and talking to the dice, and to every one round him, throwing aside
+royal severity, and bidding all be merry (says the bishop); for, to
+speak my mind, what he is afraid of is, that people should be afraid
+of him.  If he wins he is in immense good humour; then is the time to
+ask favours of him; and, says the crafty bishop, many a time have I
+lost the game, and won my cause thereby.  At three begins again the
+toil of state.  The knockers return, and those who shove them away
+return too; everywhere the litigious crowd murmurs round; and follows
+him at evening, when he goes to supper, or gets its matters settled
+by the officers of the court, who have to stay there till bed-time.
+At supper, though there are but rarely 'mimici sales,' which I cannot
+translate--some sort of jesting:  but biting and cruel insults
+(common at the feasts of the Roman Emperors) are never allowed.  His
+taste in music is severe.  No water-organs, flute-player, lyrist,
+cymbal or harp-playing woman is allowed.  All he delights in is the
+old Teutonic music, whose virtue (says the bishop) soothes the soul
+no less than does its sound the ear.  When he rises from table the
+guards for the night are set, and armed men stand at all the doors,
+to watch him through the first hours of sleep.
+
+
+
+LECTURE IV.--THE GOTHIC CIVILIZER
+
+
+
+Let us follow the fortunes of Italy and of Rome.  They are not only a
+type of the fortunes of the whole western world, but the fortunes of
+that world, as you will see, depend on Rome.
+
+You must recollect, meanwhile, that by the middle of the fifth
+century, the Western Empire had ceased to exist.  The Angles and
+Saxons were fighting their way into Britain.  The Franks were settled
+in north France and the lower Rhineland.  South of them, the centre
+of Gaul still remained Roman, governed by Counts of cities, who were
+all but independent sovereigns, while they confessed a nominal
+allegiance to the Emperor of Constantinople.  Their power was
+destined soon to be annihilated by the conquests of Clovis and his
+Franks--as false and cruel ruffians as their sainted king, the first-
+born son of the Church.  The history of Gaul for some centuries
+becomes henceforth a tissue of internecine horrors, which you must
+read for yourselves in the pages of M. Sismondi, or of Gregory of
+Tours.  The Allemanni (whose name has become among the Franks the
+general name for Germans) held the lands from the Maine to the
+Rhaetian Alps.  The Burgunds, the lands to the south-west of them,
+comprising the greater part of south-east Gaul.  The West Goths held
+the south-west of Gaul, and the greater part of Spain, having thrust
+the Sueves, and with them some Alans, into Gallicia, Asturias, and
+Portugal; and thrust, also, the Vandals across the straits of
+Gibraltar, to found a prosperous kingdom along the northern shore of
+Africa.  The East Goths, meanwhile, after various wanderings to the
+north of the Alps, lay in the present Austria and in the Danube
+lands, resting after their great struggle with the Huns, and their
+crowning victory of Netad.
+
+To follow the fortunes of Italy, we must follow those of these East
+Goths, and especially of one man among them, Theodoric, known in
+German song as Dietrich of Bern or Verona.
+
+Interesting exceedingly to us should this great hero be.  No man's
+history better shows the strange relations between the Teutons and
+the dying Empire:  but more; his life is the first instance of a
+Teuton attempting to found a civilized and ordered state, upon
+experience drawn from Roman sources; of the young world trying to
+build itself up some sort of dwelling out of the ruins of the old.
+Dietrich failed, it is true.  But if the thing had been then
+possible, he seems to have been the man to have done it.  He lived
+and laboured like what he was--a royal Amal, a true son of Woden.
+Unable to write, he founded a great kingdom by native virtue and
+common sense.  Called a barbarian, he restored prosperity to ruined
+Italy, and gave to it (and with it to the greater part of the western
+world), peace for three and thirty years.  Brought up among hostile
+sects, he laid down that golden law of religious liberty which the
+nineteenth century has not yet courage and humanity enough to accept.
+But if his life was heroic, his death was tragic.  He failed after
+all in his vast endeavours, from causes hidden from him, but visible,
+and most instructive, to us; and after having toiled impartially for
+the good of conquerors and of conquered alike, he died sadly, leaving
+behind him a people who, most of them, believed gladly the news that
+a holy hermit had seen his soul hurled down the crater of Stromboli,
+as a just punishment for the inexpiable crime of being wiser than his
+generation.
+
+Some have complained of Gibbon's 'hero-worship' of Dietrich--I do
+not.  The honest and accurate cynic so very seldom worshipped a hero,
+or believed in the existence of any, that we may take his good
+opinion as almost final and without appeal.  One author, for whose
+opinion I have already exprest a very high respect, says that he was
+but a wild man of the woods to the last; polished over skin-deep with
+Roman civilization; 'Scratch him, and you found the barbarian
+underneath {p101}.'  It may be true.  If it be true, it is a very
+high compliment.  It was not from his Roman civilization, but from
+his 'barbarian' mother and father, that he drew the 'vive
+intelligence des choses morales, et ces inspirations elevees et
+heroiques,' which M. Thierry truly attributes to him.  If there was,
+as M. Thierry truly says, another nature struggling within him--is
+there not such in every man?  And are not the struggles the more
+painful, the temptations more dangerous, the inconsistencies too
+often the more shameful, the capacities for evil as well as for good,
+more huge, just in proportion to the native force and massiveness of
+the soul?  The doctrine may seem dangerous.  It is dangerous, like
+many truths; and woe to those who, being unlearned and unstable,
+wrest it to their own destruction; and presume upon it to indulge
+their own passions under Byronic excuses of 'genius,' or 'muscular
+Christianity.'  But it is true nevertheless:  so at least the Bible
+tells us, in its wonderful delineations of David, 'the man after
+God's own heart,' and of St. Peter, the chief of the apostles.  And
+there are points of likeness between the character of Dietrich, and
+that of David, which will surely suggest themselves to any acute
+student of human nature.  M. Thierry attributes to him, as his worse
+self, 'les instincts les plus violents; la cruaute, l'astuce,
+l'egoisme impitoyable.'  The two first counts are undeniable--at
+least during his youth:  they were the common vices of the age.  The
+two latter I must hold as not proven by facts:  but were they proven,
+they would still be excusable, on the simple ground of his Greek
+education.  'Cunning and pitiless egotism' were the only moral
+qualities which Dietrich is likely to have seen exercised at the
+court of Constantinople:  and what wonder, if he was somewhat
+demoralized by the abominable atmosphere which he breathed from
+childhood?  Dietrich is an illustration of the saga with which these
+lectures began.  He is the very type of the forest child, bewitched
+by the fine things of the wicked Troll garden.  The key to the man's
+character, indeed the very glory of it, is the long struggle within
+him, between the Teutonic and the Greek elements.  Dazzled and
+debauched, at times, by the sinful glories of the Bosphorus, its
+palaces, its gold, and its women, he will break the spell
+desperately.  He will become a wild Goth and an honest man once more;
+he will revenge his own degradation on that court and empire which he
+knows well enough to despise, distrust and hate.  Again and again the
+spell comes over him.  His vanity and his passions make him once more
+a courtier among the Greeks; but the blood of Odin is strong within
+him still; again and again he rises, with a noble shame, to virtue
+and patriotism, trampling under foot selfish luxury and glory, till
+the victory is complete; and he turns away in the very moment of the
+greatest temptation, from the bewitching city, to wander, fight,
+starve, and at last conquer a new land for himself and for his
+nation; and shew, by thirty years of justice and wisdom, what that
+true Dietrich was, which had been so long overlaid by the false
+Dietrich of his sinful youth.
+
+Look at the facts of his history, as they stand, and see whether they
+do not bear out this, and no other, theory of his character.
+
+The year was 455, two years after Attila's death.  Near Vienna a boy
+was born, of Theodemir one of the Gothic kings and his favourite
+Erleva.  He was sent when eight years old to Constantinople as a
+hostage.  The Emperor Leo had agreed to pay the Goths 300 pounds of
+gold every year, if they would but leave him in peace; and young
+Dietrich was the pledge of the compact.  There he grew up amid all
+the wisdom of the Romans, watching it all, and yet never even
+learning to write.  It seems to some that the German did not care to
+learn; it seems to me rather that they did not care to teach.  He
+came back to his people at eighteen, delighted them by his strength
+and stature, and became, to all appearance, a Goth of the Goths;
+going adventures with six thousand volunteers against the Sarmatae,
+who had just defeated the Greeks, and taken a city--which he retook,
+but instead of restoring it to the Emperor, kept himself.  Food
+becoming scarce in Austria, the Ostrogoths moved some into Italy,
+some down on Illyria and Thessaly; and the Emperor gracefully
+presented them with the country of which they had already taken
+possession.
+
+In every case, you see, this method went on.  The failing Emperors
+bought off the Teutons where they could; submitted to them where they
+could not; and readily enough turned on them when they had a chance.
+The relations between the two parties can be hardly better explained,
+than by comparing them to those between the English adventurers in
+Hindostan and the falling Rajahs and Sultans of the last century.
+
+After a while Theodoric, or Dietrich, found himself, at his father's
+death, sole king of the Ostrogoths.  This period of his life is very
+obscure:  but one hint at least we have, which may explain his whole
+future career.  Side by side with him and with his father before him,
+there was another Dietrich--Dietrich the One-eyed, son of Triar, a
+low-born adventurer, who had got together the remnants of some low-
+caste tribes, who were called the Goths of Thrace, and was swaggering
+about the court of Constantinople, as, when the East Goths first met
+him, what we call Warden of the Marches, with some annual pay for his
+Goths.  He was insolent to Theodemir and his family, and they
+retaliated by bitter hatred.  It was intolerable for them, Amals,
+sons of Odin, to be insulted by this upstart.  So they went on for
+years, till the miserable religious squabble fell out--you may read
+it in Gibbon--which ended in the Emperor Zeno, a low-born and cunning
+man, suspected of the murder of his own son by the princess Ariadne,
+being driven out of Constantinople by Basiliscus.  We need not enter
+into such matters, except as far as they bear on the history of
+Dietrich the Amal.  Dietrich the One-eyed helped Basiliscus--and then
+Zeno seems to have sent for Dietrich the Amal to help him.  He came,
+but too late.  Basiliscus' party had already broken up; Basiliscus
+and his family had taken refuge in a church, from whence Zeno enticed
+him, on the promise of shedding no blood, which he did not:  but
+instead, put him, his wife and children, in a dry cistern, walled it
+up and left them.
+
+Dietrich the Amal rose into power and great glory, and became 'son-
+in-arms' to the Emperor.  But the young Amal longed for adventures.
+He offered to take his Ostrogoths into Italy, drive out Odoacer, and
+seat on the throne of the West, Nepos, one of the many puppets who
+had been hurled off it a few years before.  Zeno had need of the
+young hero nearer home, and persuaded him to stay in Constantinople,
+eat, drink, and be merry.
+
+Whereon Odoacer made Romulus Agustulus and the Roman Senate write to
+Zeno that they wanted no Emperor save him at Constantinople; that
+they were very happy under the excellent Odoacer, and that they
+therefore sent to Zeno, as the rightful owner, all the Imperial
+insignia and ornaments; things which may have been worn, some of
+them, by Augustus himself.  And so ended, even in name, the Empire of
+Rome.  All which the Amal saw, and, as will appear, did not forget.
+
+Zeno gave the Amal all that the One-eyed had had before him, and paid
+the Ostrogoths yearly as he had paid the One-eye's men.  The One-eyed
+was banished to his cantonments, and of course revolted.  Zeno wanted
+to buy him off, but the Amal would not hear of it; he would not help
+the Romans against his rival, unless they swore perpetual enmity
+against him.
+
+They did so, and he marched to the assistance of the wretched Empire.
+He was to be met by Roman reinforcements at the Haemus.  They never
+came; and the Amal, disgusted and disheartened, found himself
+entangled in the defiles of the Haemus, starving and worn out; with
+the One-eyed entrenched on an inaccessible rock, where he dared not
+attack him.
+
+Then followed an extraordinary scene.  The One-eyed came down again
+and again from his rock, and rode round the Amal's camp, shouting to
+him words so true, that one must believe them to have been really
+spoken.
+
+'Perjured boy, madman, betrayer of your race--do you not see that the
+Roman plan is as always to destroy Goths by Goths?  Whichever of us
+falls, they, not we, will be the stronger.  They never met you as
+they promised, at the cities, nor here.  They have sent you out here
+to perish in the desert.'
+
+Then the East Goths raised a cry.  'The One-eyed is right.  The Amal
+cares not that these men are Goths like ourselves.'
+
+Then the One-eyed appeals to the Goths themselves, as he curses the
+Amal.
+
+'Why are you killing your kinsmen?  Why have you made so many widows?
+Where is all their wealth gone, they who set out to fight for you?
+Each of them had two or three horses:  but now they are walking on
+foot behind you like slaves,--free-men as well-born as yourself:- and
+you promised to measure them out gold by the bushel.'
+
+Was it not true?  If young Dietrich had in him (and he shewed that he
+had in after years) a Teuton's heart, may not that strange interview
+have opened his eyes to his own folly, and taught him that the Teuton
+must be his own master, and not the mercenary of the Romans?
+
+The men cried out that it was true.  He must make peace with the One-
+eyed, or they would do it themselves; and peace was made.  They both
+sent ambassadors to Zeno; the Amal complaining of treachery; the One-
+eyed demanding indemnity for all his losses.  The Emperor was
+furious.  He tried to buy off the Amal by marrying him to a princess
+of the blood royal, and making him a Caesar.  Dietrich would not
+consent; he felt that it was a snare.  Zeno proclaimed the One-eyed
+an enemy to the Empire; and ended by reinstating him in his old
+honours, and taking them from the Amal.  The Amal became furious,
+burnt villages, slaughtered the peasants, even (the Greeks say) cut
+off the hands of his captives.  He had broken with the Romans at
+last.  The Roman was astride of him, and of all Teutons, like
+Sindbad's old man of the sea.  The only question, as with Sindbad,
+was whether he should get drunk, and give them a chance of throwing
+the perfidious tyrant.  And now the time was come.  He was compelled
+to ask himself, not--what shall I be in relation to myself:  but what
+shall I be in relation to the Kaiser of the Romans--a mercenary, a
+slave, or a conqueror--for one of the three I must be?
+
+So it went on, year after year--sometimes with terrible reverses for
+Dietrich, till the year 480.  Then the old One-eyed died, in a
+strange way.  Mounting a wild horse at the tent-door, the beast
+reared before he could get his seat; afraid of pulling it over by the
+curb, he let it go.  A lance, in Gothic fashion, was hanging at the
+tent-door, and the horse plunged the One-eyed against it.  The point
+went deep into his side, and the old fighting man was at rest for
+ever.
+
+And then came a strange peripeteia for the Amal.  Zeno, we know not
+why, sent instantly for him.  He had been ravaging, pursuing,
+defeating Roman troops, or being defeated by them.  Now he must come
+to Rome.  His Goths should have the Lower Danube.  He should have
+glory and honour to spare.  He came.  His ideal, at this time, seems
+actually to have been to live like a Roman citizen in Constantinople,
+and help to govern the Empire.  Recollect, he was still little more
+than five and twenty years old.
+
+So he went to Constantinople, and I suppose with him the faithful
+mother, and faithful sister, who had been with him in all his
+wanderings.  He had a triumph decreed him at the Emperor's expense,
+was made Consul Ordinarius ('which,' saith Jornandes, 'is accounted
+the highest good and chief glory in the world') and Master-general,
+and lodged in the palace.
+
+What did it all mean?  Dietrich was dazzled by it, at least for a
+while.  What it meant, he found out too soon.  He was to fight the
+Emperor's battles against all rebels, and he fought them, to return
+irritated, complaining (justly or unjustly) of plots against his
+life; to be pacified, like a child, with the honour of an equestrian
+statue; then to sink down into Byzantine luxury for seven inglorious
+years, with only one flashing out of the ancient spirit, when he
+demanded to go alone against the Bulgars, and killed their king with
+his own hand.
+
+What woke him from his dream?  The cry of his starving people.
+
+The Goths, settled on the lower Danube, had been living, as wild men
+and mercenaries live, recklessly from hand to mouth, drinking and
+gambling till their families were in want.  They send to the Amal.
+'While thou art revelling at Roman banquets, we are starving--come
+back ere we are ruined.'
+
+They were jealous, too, of the success of Odoacer and his
+mercenaries.  He was growing now to be a great power; styling himself
+'King of nations {p109},' giving away to the Visigoths the
+Narbonnaise, the last remnant of the Western Empire; collecting round
+him learned Romans like Symmachus, Boethius, and Cassiodorus;
+respecting the Catholic clergy; and seemingly doing his best to
+govern well.  His mercenaries, however, would not be governed.  Under
+their violence and oppression agriculture and population were both
+failing; till Pope Gelasius speaks of 'AEmilia, Tuscia, ceteraeque
+provinciae in quibus nullus prope hominum existit.'
+
+Meanwhile there seems to have been a deep hatred on the part of the
+Goths to Odoacer and his mercenaries.  Dr. Sheppard thinks that they
+despised him himself as a man of low birth.  But his father AEdecon
+had been chief of the Turklings, and was most probably of royal
+blood.  It is very unlikely, indeed, that so large a number of
+Teutons would have followed any man who had not Odin's blood in his
+veins.  Was there a stain on Odoacer from his early connexion with
+Attila?  Or was the hatred against his men more than himself,
+contempt especially of the low-caste Herules,--a question of race,
+springing out of those miserable tribe-feuds, which kept the Teutons
+always divided and weak?  Be that as it may, Odoacer had done a deed
+which raised this hatred to open fury.  He had gone over the Alps
+into Rugiland (then Noricum, and the neighbourhood of Vienna) and
+utterly destroyed those of the Rugier who had not gone into Italy
+under his banner.  They had plundered, it is said, the cell of his
+old friend St. Severinus, as soon as the saint died, of the garments
+laid up for the poor, and a silver cup, and the sacred vessels of the
+mass.  Be that as it may, Odoacer utterly exterminated them, and
+carried their king Feletheus, or Fava, back to Italy, with Gisa his
+'noxious wife;' and with them many Roman Christians, and (seemingly)
+the body of St. Severinus himself.  But this had been a small thing,
+if he had not advised himself to have a regular Roman triumph, with
+Fava, the captive king, walking beside his chariot; and afterwards,
+in the approved fashion of the ancient Romans on such occasions, to
+put Fava to death in cold blood.
+
+The records of this feat are to be found, as far as I know them, in
+one short chapter (I. xix.) of Paulus Diaconus, and in Muratori's
+notes thereto; but however small the records, the deed decided the
+fate of Italy.  Frederic, son of Fava, took refuge with the
+Ostrogoths, and demanded revenge in the name of his royal race; and
+it is easy to conceive that the sympathies of the Goths would be with
+him.  An attack (seemingly unprovoked) on an ancient Teutonic nation
+by a mere band of adventurers was--or could easily be made--a
+grievous wrong, and clear casus belli, over and above the innate
+Teutonic lust for fighting and adventures, simply for the sake of
+'the sport.'
+
+Dietrich went back, and from that day, the dream of eastern luxury
+was broken, and young Dietrich was a Goth again, for good and for
+evil.
+
+He assembled the Goths, and marched straight on Constantinople,
+burning and pillaging as he went.  So say, at least, the Greek
+historians, of whom, all through this strange story, no one need
+believe more than he likes.  Had the Goths had the writing of the
+life of Dietrich, we should have heard another tale.  As it is, we
+have, as it were, a life of Lord Clive composed by the court scribes
+of Delhi.
+
+To no Roman would he tell what was in his mind.  Five leagues from
+Constantinople he paused.  Some say that he had compassion on the
+city where he had been brought up.  Who can tell?  He demanded to
+speak to Zeno alone, and the father in arms and his wild son met once
+more.  There was still strong in him the old Teutonic feudal
+instinct.  He was 'Zeno's man,' in spite of all.  He asked (says
+Jornandes) Zeno's leave to march against Odoacer, and conquer Italy.
+Procopius and the Valesian Fragment say that Zeno sent him, and that
+in case of success, he was to reign there till Zeno came.  Zeno was,
+no doubt, glad to get rid of him at any price.  As Ennodius well
+says, 'Another's honour made him remember his own origin, and fear
+the very legions which obeyed him--for that obedience is suspected
+which serves the unworthy.'  Rome was only nominally under Zeno's
+dominion; and it mattered little to him whether Herule or Gothic
+adventurer called himself his representative.
+
+Then was held a grand function.  Dietrich, solemnly appointed
+'Patrician,' had Italy ceded to him by a 'Pragmatic' sanction, and
+Zeno placed on his head the sacrum velamen, a square of purple,
+signifying in Constantinople things wonderful, august, imperial--if
+they could only be made to come to pass.  And he made them come to
+pass.  He gathered all Teutonic heroes of every tribe, as well as his
+own; and through Roumelia, and through the Alps, a long and dangerous
+journey, went Dietrich and his Goths, with their wives and children,
+and all they had, packed on waggons; living on their flocks and
+herds, grinding their corn in hand-mills, and hunting as they went,
+for seven hundred miles of march; fighting as they went with Bulgars
+and Sarmatians, who had swarmed into the waste marches of Hungary and
+Carniola, once populous, cultivated, and full of noble cities;
+fighting a desperate battle with the Gepidae, up to their knees in a
+morass; till over the passes of the Julian Alps, where icicles hung
+upon their beards, and their clothes cracked with frost, they poured
+into the Venetian plains.  It was a daring deed; and needed a spirit
+like Dietrich's to carry it through.
+
+Odoacer awaited him near the ruins of Aquileia.  On the morning of
+the fight, as he was arming, Dietrich asked his noble mother to bring
+him some specially fine mantle, which she had embroidered for him,
+and put it over his armour, 'that all men may see how he goes gayer
+into the fight than ever he did into feast.  For this day she shall
+see whether she have brought a man-child into the world, or no.'
+
+And in front of Verona (where the plain was long white with human
+bones), he beat Odoacer, and after a short and sharp campaign, drove
+him to Ravenna.  But there, Roman fortifications, and Roman
+artillery, stopped, as usual, the Goth; and Odoacer fulfilled his
+name so well, and stood so stout, that he could only be reduced by
+famine; and at last surrendered on terms, difficult now to discover.
+
+Gibbon says, that there was a regular compact that they should enjoy
+equal authority, and refers to Procopius:  but Procopius only says,
+that they should live together peaceably 'in that city.'  Be that as
+it may, Odoacer and his party were detected, after awhile, conspiring
+against Dietrich, and put to death in some dark fashion.  Gibbon, as
+advocatus diaboli, of course gives the doubt against Dietrich, by his
+usual enthymeme--All men are likely to be rogues, ergo, Dietrich was
+one.  Rather hard measure, when one remembers that the very men who
+tell the story are Dietrich's own enemies.  By far the most important
+of them, the author of the Valesian Fragment, who considers Dietrich
+damned as an Arian, and the murderer of Boethius and Symmachus, says
+plainly that Odoacer plotted against his life.  But it was a dark
+business at best.
+
+Be that as it may, Dietrich the Amal found himself in one day king of
+all Italy, without a peer.  And now followed a three and thirty
+years' reign of wisdom, justice, and prosperity, unexampled in the
+history of those centuries.  Between the days of the Antonines and
+those of Charlemagne, I know no such bright spot in the dark history
+of Europe.
+
+As for his transferring the third of the lands of Italy, which had
+been held by Odoacer's men, to his own Goths,--that was just or
+unjust (even putting out of the question the rights of conquest),
+according to what manner of men Odoacer's mercenaries were, and what
+right they had to the lands.  At least it was done so, says
+Cassiodorus, that it notoriously gave satisfaction to the Romans
+themselves.  One can well conceive it.  Odoacer's men had been
+lawless adventurers; and now law was installed as supreme.  Dietrich,
+in his long sojourn at the Emperor's court, had discovered the true
+secret of Roman power, which made the Empire terrible even in her
+fallen fortunes; and that was Law.  Law, which tells every man what
+to expect, and what is expected of him; and so gives, if not content,
+still confidence, energy, industry.  The Goths were to live by the
+Gothic law, the Romans by the Roman.  To amalgamate the two races
+would have been as impossible as to amalgamate English and Hindoos.
+The parallel is really tolerably exact.  The Goth was very English;
+and the over-civilized, learned, false, profligate Roman was the very
+counterpart of the modern Brahmin.  But there was to be equal justice
+between man and man.  If the Goths were the masters of much of the
+Roman soil, still spoliation and oppression were forbidden; and the
+remarkable edict or code of Theodoric, shews how deeply into his
+great mind had sunk the idea of the divineness of Law.  It is short,
+and of Draconic severity, especially against spoliation, cheating,
+false informers, abuse by the clergy of the rights of sanctuary, and
+all offences against the honour of women.  I advise you all to study
+it, as an example of what an early Teutonic king thought men ought to
+do, and could be made to do.
+
+The Romans were left to their luxury and laziness; and their country
+villas (long deserted) were filled again by the owners.  The Goths
+were expected to perform military service, and were drilled from
+their youth in those military evolutions which had so often given the
+disciplined Roman the victory over the undisciplined Goth, till every
+pomoerium (boulevard), says Ennodius, might be seen full of boys and
+lads, learning to be soldiers.  Everything meanwhile was done to
+soothe the wounded pride of the conquered.  The senate of Rome was
+still kept up in name (as by Odoacer), her nobles flattered by
+sonorous titles, and the officers of the kingdom and the palace bore
+the same names as they would have done under Roman emperors.  The
+whole was an attempt to develop Dietrich's own Goths by the only
+civilization which he knew, that of Constantinople:  but to engraft
+on it an order, a justice, a freedom, a morality, which was the
+'barbarian' element.  The treasures of Roman art were placed under
+the care of government officers; baths, palaces, churches, aqueducts,
+were repaired or founded; to build seems to have been Dietrich's
+great delight; and we have left us, on a coin, some image of his own
+palace at Verona, a strange building with domes and minarets,
+something like a Turkish mosque; standing, seemingly, on the arcades
+of some older Roman building.  Dietrich the Goth may, indeed, be
+called the founder of 'Byzantine' architecture throughout the Western
+world.
+
+Meanwhile, agriculture prospered once more; the Pontine Marshes were
+drained; the imperial ports restored, and new cities sprang up.  'The
+new ones,' says Machiavelli, 'were Venice, Siena, Ferrara, Aquileia;
+and those which became extended were Florence, Genoa, Pisa, Milan,
+Naples, and Bologna.'  Of these the great sea-ports, especially
+Venice, were founded not by Goths, but by Roman and Greek fugitives:
+but it was the security and liberality of Dietrich's reign which made
+their existence possible; and Venice really owes far more to the
+barbarian hero, than to the fabled patronage of St. Mark.
+
+'From this devastation and new population,' continues Machiavelli,
+'arose new languages, which, partaking of the native idiom of the new
+people, and of the old Roman, formed a new manner of discourse.
+Besides, not only were the names of provinces changed, but also of
+lakes, rivers, seas, and men; for France, Spain, and Italy are full
+of fresh names, wholly different from the ancient.'
+
+This reign of Dietrich was, in fact, the birth-hour of modern Italy;
+and, as Machiavelli says, 'brought the country to such a state of
+greatness, that her previous sufferings were unrecognizable.'  We
+shall see hereafter how the great Goth's work was all undone; and (to
+their everlasting shame) by whom it was undone.
+
+The most interesting records of the time are, without doubt, the
+letters of Cassiodorus, the king's secretary and chancellor, which
+have come down to us in great numbers.  There are letters among them
+on all questions of domestic and foreign policy:  to the kings of the
+Varni, kings of the Herules, kings of the Thuringer (who were still
+heathens beyond the Black forest), calling on them all to join him
+and the Burgundians, and defend his son-in-law Alaric II., king of
+the Visigoths, against Clovis and his Franks.  There are letters,
+too, bearing on the religious feuds of the Roman population, and on
+the morals and social state of Rome itself, of which I shall say
+nothing in this lecture, having cause to refer to them hereafter.
+But if you wish to know the times, you must read Cassiodorus
+thoroughly.
+
+In his letters you will remark how most of the so-called Roman names
+are Greek.  You will remark, too, as a sign of the decadence of taste
+and art, that though full of wisdom and practical morality, the
+letters are couched in the most wonderful bombast to be met with,
+even in that age of infimae Latinitatis.  One can only explain their
+style by supposing that King Dietrich, having supplied the sense,
+left it for Cassiodorus to shape it as he thought best; and when the
+letter was read over to him, took for granted (being no scholar) that
+that was the way in which Roman Caesars and other cultivated
+personages ought to talk; admired his secretary's learning; and
+probably laughed in his sleeve at the whole thing, thinking that ten
+words of honest German would have said all that he meant.  As for
+understanding these flights of rhetoric, it is impossible that
+Dietrich could have done so:  perhaps not even Cassiodorus himself.
+Take as one example, such a letter as this.--After a lofty moral
+maxim, which I leave for you to construe--'In partem pietatis recidit
+mitigata districtio; et sub beneficio praestat, qui poenam debitam
+moderatione considerata palpaverit,'--Jovinus the curial is informed,
+after the most complex method, that having first quarrelled with a
+fellow-curial, and then proceeded to kill him, he is banished for
+life to the isle of Volcano, among the Liparis.  As a curial is a
+gentleman and a government magistrate, the punishment is just enough;
+but why should Cassiodorus (certainly not King Dietrich) finish a
+short letter by a long dissertation on volcanoes in general, and
+Stromboli in particular, insisting on the wonder that the rocks,
+though continually burnt, are continually renewed by 'the
+inextricable potency of nature;' and only returning to Jovinus to
+inform him that he will henceforth follow the example of a
+salamander, which always lives in fire, 'being so contracted by
+natural cold, that it is tempered by burning flame.  It is a thin and
+small animal, connected with worms, and clothed with a yellow
+colour;' . . . Cassiodorus then returns to the main subject of
+volcanoes, and ends with a story of Stromboli having broken out just
+as Hannibal poisoned himself at the court of Prusias;--information
+which may have been interesting, though not consoling, to poor
+Jovinus, in the prospect of living there; but of which one would like
+to have had king Dietrich's opinion.  Did he felicitate himself like
+a simple Teuton, on the wonderful learning and eloquence of his
+Greek-Roman secretary?  Or did he laugh a royal laugh at the whole
+letter, and crack a royal joke at Cassiodorus and all quill-driving
+schoolmasters and lawyers--the two classes of men whom the Goths
+hated especially, and at the end to which they by their pedantries
+had brought imperial Rome?  One would like to know.  For not only was
+Dietrich no scholar himself, but he had a contempt for the very
+scholarship which he employed, and forbade the Goths to learn it--as
+the event proved, a foolish and fatal prejudice.  But it was
+connected in his mind with chicanery, effeminacy, and with the cruel
+and degrading punishments of children.  Perhaps the ferula had been
+applied to him at Constantinople in old days.  If so, no wonder that
+he never learnt to write.  'The boy who trembles at a cane,' he used
+to say, 'will never face a lance.'  His mother wit, meanwhile, was so
+shrewd that 'many of his sayings (says the unknown author of the
+invaluable Valesian Fragment) remain among us to this day.'  Two
+only, as far as I know, have been preserved, quaint enough:
+
+
+'He that hath gold, or a devil, cannot hide it.'
+
+
+And
+
+
+'The Roman, when poor, apes the Goth:  the Goth,
+when rich, apes the Roman.'
+
+
+There is a sort of Solomon's judgment, too, told of him, in the case
+of a woman who refused to acknowledge her own son, which was
+effectual enough; but somewhat too homely to repeat.
+
+As for his personal appearance, it was given in a saga; but I have
+not consulted it myself, and am no judge of its authenticity.  The
+traditional description of him is that of a man almost beardless--a
+rare case among the Goths--with masses of golden ringlets, and black
+eyebrows over 'oculos caesios,' the blue grey eyes common to so many
+conquerors.  A complexion so peculiar, that one must believe it to be
+truly reported.
+
+His tragic death, and the yet more tragic consequences thereof, will
+be detailed in the next lecture.
+
+
+
+LECTURE V--DIETRICH'S END.
+
+
+
+I have now to speak to you on the latter end of Dietrich's reign--
+made so sadly famous by the death of Boethius--the last Roman
+philosopher, as he has been called for centuries, and not unjustly.
+His De Consolatione Philosophiae is a book good for any man, full of
+wholesome and godly doctrine.  For centuries it ranked as high as the
+highest classics; higher perhaps at times than any book save the
+Bible, among not merely scholars, but statesmen.  It is the last
+legacy of the dying old world to the young world which was trampling
+it out of life; and therefore it is full of sadness.  But beneath the
+sadness there is faith and hope; for God is just, and virtue must be
+triumphant and immortal, and the absolute and only good for man.  The
+whole story is very sad.  Dietrich was one of those great men, who
+like Henry VIII, Elizabeth, Napoleon, or the late Czar Nicholas, have
+lived too long for their own honour.  The old heathen would have
+attributed his misadventures to a [Greek text which cannot be
+reproduced], an envy of the Gods, who will not abide to see men as
+prosperous as they themselves are.  We may attribute it more simply
+and more piously to the wear and tear of frail humanity.  For it may
+be that very few human souls can stand for many years the strain of a
+great rule.  I do not mean that they break down from overwork, but
+that they are pulled out of shape by it; and that, especially, the
+will becomes enormously developed at the expense of the other powers
+of the soul, till the man becomes, as he grows older, imperious,
+careless of, or irritated by counsel, determined to have his own way
+because it is his own way.  We see the same tendency in all
+accustomed for a long while to absolute rule, even in petty matters;-
+-in the old ship's captain, the old head of a factory, the old master
+of hounds; and we do not blame them for it.  It is a disease incident
+to their calling, as pedantry is to that of a scholar, or astuteness
+to that of an attorney.  But it is most dangerous in the greatest
+minds, and in the highest places; and only to be kept off by them, as
+by us, each in our place, by honest self-examination, diligent
+prayer, and the grace of God which comes thereby.  Once or twice in
+the world's history a great ruler, like Charles the Fifth, cuts the
+Gordian knot, and escapes into a convent:  but how few can or ought
+to do that?  There are those who must go on ruling, or see their
+country ruined; for all depends on them.  So had Queen Elizabeth to
+do; so had Dietrich of Bern likewise.  After them would come the
+deluge, and did come; and they must endure to the last, whatever it
+may cost to their own health of character, or peace of mind.
+
+But most painful, and most dangerous to the veteran sovereign, is it
+to have learnt to suspect, perhaps to despise, those whom he rules;
+to have thrown away all his labour upon knaves and fools; to have
+cast his pearls before swine, and find them turning again and rending
+him.  That feeling, forced from Queen Elizabeth, in her old age, that
+tragic cry, 'I am a miserable forlorn woman.  There is none about me
+whom I can trust.'  She was a woman, always longing for some one to
+love; and her heart broke under it all.  But do you not see that
+where the ruler is not an affectionate woman, but a strong proud man,
+the effect may be very different, and very terrible?--how, roused to
+indignation, scorn, suspicion, rage, he may turn to bay against his
+own subjects, with 'Scoundrels! you have seen the fair side of my
+character, and in vain.  Now you shall see the foul, and beware for
+yourselves.'
+
+Even so, I fancy, did old Dietrich turn to bay, and did deeds which
+have blackened his name for ever.  Heaven forgive him! for surely he
+had provocation enough and to spare.
+
+I have told you of the simple, half-superstitious respect which the
+Teuton had for the prestige of Rome.  Dietrich seems to have partaken
+of it, like the rest.  Else why did he not set himself up as Caesar
+of Rome?  Why did he always consider himself as son-in-arms, and
+quasi-vassal, of the Caesar of Constantinople?  He had been in youth
+overawed by the cunning civilization which he had seen in the great
+city.  He felt, with a noble modesty, that he could not emulate it.
+He must copy it afar off.  He must take to his counsels men like
+Cassiodorus, Symmachus, Boethius, born and bred in it; trained from
+childhood in the craft by which, as a patent fact, the Kaisers of
+Rome had been for centuries, even in their decay and degradation, the
+rulers of the nations.  Yet beneath that there must have been a
+perpetual under-current of contempt for it and for Rome--the
+'colluvies gentium'--the sink of the nations, with its conceit, its
+pomposity, its beggary, its profligacy, its superstition, its
+pretence of preserving the Roman law and rights, while practically it
+cared for no law nor right at all.  Dietrich had had to write letter
+upon letter, to prevent the green and blue factions cutting each
+other's throats at the public spectacles; letters to the tribunus
+voluptatum, who had to look after the pantomimes and loose women,
+telling him to keep the poor wretches in some decent order, and to
+set them and the city an example of a better life, by being a chaste
+and respectable man himself.  Letter upon letter of Cassiodorus',
+written in Dietrich's name, disclose a state of things in Rome on
+which a Goth could look only with disgust and contempt.
+
+And what if he discovered (or thought that he discovered) that these
+prating coxcombs--who were actually living on government bounty, and
+had their daily bread, daily bath, daily oil, daily pork, daily wine,
+found for them at government expense, while they lounged from the
+theatre to the church, and the church to the theatre--were plotting
+with Justin the scoundrel and upstart Emperor at Constantinople, to
+restore forsooth the liberties of Rome?  And that that was their
+answer to his three and thirty years of good government, respect,
+indulgence, which had raised them up again out of all the miseries of
+domestic anarchy and foreign invasion?
+
+And what if he discovered (or thought that he discovered) that the
+Catholic Clergy, with Pope John at their head, were in the very same
+plot for bringing in the Emperor of Constantinople, on the grounds of
+religion; because he was persecuting the Arian Goths at
+Constantinople, and therefore would help them to persecute them in
+Italy?  And that that was their answer to his three and thirty years
+of unexampled religious liberty?  Would not those two facts (even the
+belief that they were facts) have been enough to drive many a wise
+man mad?
+
+How far they were facts, we never shall exactly know.  Almost all our
+information comes from Catholic historians--and he would be a rash
+man who would pin his faith on any statement of theirs concerning the
+actions of a heretic.  But I think, even with no other help than
+theirs, we may see why Dietrich would have looked with horror on any
+intimacy between the Church of Rome and the Court of Constantinople.
+
+We must remember first what the Greek Empire was then, and who was
+the new Emperor.  Anastasius the poor old Emperor, dying at eighty
+with his heart broken by monks and priests, had an ugly dream; and
+told it to Amantius the eunuch and lord chamberlain.  Whereon
+Amantius said he had had a dream too;--how a great hog flew at him as
+he was in waiting in the very presence, and threw him down and eat
+him fairly up.  Which came true--though not in the way Amantius
+expected.  On the death of Anastasius he determined to set up as
+Emperor a creature of his own.  For this purpose he must buy the
+guards; to which noble end he put a large sum of treasure into the
+hands of Justin, senator, and commander-in-chief of the said guards,
+who takes the money, and spends it on his own account; so that the
+miserable eunuch finds, not his man, but Justin himself, Emperor, and
+his hard-earned money spent against him.  The mere rise of this
+unscrupulous swindler and his still more unscrupulous nephew,
+Justinian, would have been enough to rouse Dietrich's suspicion, if
+not fear.
+
+Deep and unspeakable must have been the royal Amal's contempt for the
+man.  For he must have known him well at Constantinople in his youth;
+known how he was a Goth or other Teuton after all, though he was
+called a Dardanian; how his real name was Uprauda (upright), the son
+of Stock--which Uprauda he had latinized into Justinus.  The Amal
+knew well how he had entered the Emperor's guard; how he had
+intrigued and fought his way up (for the man did not lack courage and
+conduct) to his general's commission; and now, by a crowning act of
+roguery, to the Empire.  He had known too, most probably, the man's
+vulgar peasant wife, who, in her efforts to ape royalty, was making
+herself the laughing-stock of the people, and who was urging on her
+already willing husband to persecute.  And this man he saw ready to
+convulse his own Empire by beginning a violent persecution against
+the Arians.  He was dangerous enough as a villain, doubly dangerous
+as a bigot also.
+
+We must remember next what the Greek Church was then; a chaos of
+intrigue, villainy, slander, and wild fury, tearing to pieces itself
+and the whole Empire by religious feuds, in which the doctrine in
+question becomes invisible amid the passions and crimes of the
+disputants, while the Lords of the Church were hordes of wild monks,
+who swarm out of their dens to head the lowest mobs, or fight pitched
+battles with each other.  The ecclesiastical history of the fifth
+century in the Eastern Empire is one, which not even the genius of a
+Gibbon or a Milman can make interesting, or even intelligible.
+
+Recollect that Dietrich had seen much of this with his own eyes; had
+seen actually, as I told you, the rebellion of Basiliscus and the
+Eutychian Bishops headed by the mad Daniel the Stylite against his
+foster father the Emperor Zeno; had seen that Emperor (as Dean Milman
+forcibly puts it) 'flying before a naked hermit, who had lost the use
+of his legs by standing sixteen years upon a column.'  Recollect that
+Dietrich and his Goths had helped to restore that Emperor to his
+throne; and then understand in what a school he had learnt his great
+ideas of religious toleration:  how deep must have been the
+determination to have no such doings in his kingdom; how deep, too,
+the dread of any similar outbreak at Rome.
+
+Recollect, also, that now in his old age he had just witnessed the
+same iniquities again rending the Eastern Empire; the old Emperor
+Anastasius hunted to death by armies of mad monks about the
+Monophysite Heresy; the cities, even the holiest places of the East,
+stained with Christian blood; everywhere mob-law, murder, treachery,
+assassination even in the house of God; and now the new Emperor
+Justin was throwing himself into the party of the Orthodox with all
+the blind rage of an ignorant peasant; persecuting, expelling,
+shutting up the Arian Churches of the Goths, refusing to hear
+Dietrich's noble appeals; and evidently organizing a great movement
+against those peaceable Arians, against whom, during the life-time of
+Dietrich, their bitterest enemies do not allege a single case of
+persecution.
+
+Remember, too, that Dietrich had had experience of similar outbreaks
+of fanaticism at Rome; that the ordination of two rival Popes had
+once made the streets run with blood; that he had seen priests
+murdered, monasteries fired, nuns insulted, and had had to interfere
+with the strong arm of the law, and himself decide in favour of the
+Pope who had the most votes, and was first chosen; and that in the
+quarrels, intrigues, and slanders, which followed that election, he
+had had too good proof that the ecclesiastics and the mob of Rome, if
+he but let them, could behave as ill as that of Constantinople; and,
+moreover, that this new Pope John, who seems to have been a hot-
+headed fanatic, had begun his rule by whipping and banishing
+Manichees--by whose permission, does not appear.
+
+Recollect too, that for some reason or other, Dietrich, when he had
+interfered in Eastern matters, had been always on the side of the
+Orthodox and the Council of Chalcedon.  He had fought for the
+Orthodox against Basiliscus.  He had backed the Orthodox and
+Vitalianus their champion, against the late Emperor Anastasius; and
+now as soon as the Orthodox got into power under Justin, this was the
+reward of his impartiality.  If he did not distrust and despise the
+Church and Emperor of the East, he must have been not a hero, but a
+saint.
+
+Recollect, too, that in those very days, Catholic bigotry had broken
+out in a general plunder of the Jews.  At Rome, at Milan, and Genoa
+their houses had been sacked, and their synagogues burnt; and
+Dietrich, having compelled the Catholics to rebuild them at their own
+expense, had earned the hatred of a large portion of his subjects.
+And now Pope John was doing all he could to thwart him.  Dietrich
+bade him go to Constantinople, and plead with Justin for the
+persecuted Arians.  He refused.  Dietrich shipt him off, nolentem
+volentem.  But when he got to Constantinople he threw his whole
+weight into the Emperor's scale.  He was received by Justin as if he
+was St. Peter himself, the Emperor coming out to meet him with
+processions and wax-lights, imploring his blessing; he did exactly
+the opposite to what Dietrich bade him do; and published on his
+return a furious epistle to the bishops of Italy, calling upon them
+to oppress and extirpate the Arian perfidy, so that no root of it is
+left:  to consecrate the Arian churches wheresoever he found them,
+pleading the advice of the most pious and Christian Emperor Justin,
+talking of Dietrich as tainted inwardly and wrapt up outwardly with
+the pest of heresy.  On which Cochlaeus (who religiously believes
+that Dietrich was damned for his Arianism, and that all his virtues
+went for nothing because he had not charity, which exists, he says,
+alone within the pale of the Church), cannot help the naive comment,
+that if the Pontiff did really write that letter, he cannot wonder at
+Dietrich's being a little angry.  Kings now, it is true, can afford
+to smile at such outbursts; they could not afford to do so in
+Dietrich's days.  Such words meant murder, pillage, civil war,
+dethronement, general anarchy; and so Dietrich threw Pope John into
+prison.  He had been in bad health before he sailed to
+Constantinople, and in a few months he died, and was worshipped as a
+saint.
+
+As for the political conspiracy, we shall never know the truth of it.
+The 'Anonymus Valesii,' meanwhile says, that when Cyprian accused
+Albinus, Boethius answered, 'It is false:  but if Albinus has done
+it, so have I, and the whole senate, with one consent.  It is false,
+my Lord King!'  Whatever such words may prove, they prove at least
+this, that Boethius, as he says himself, was the victim of his own
+chivalry.  To save Albinus, and the senate, he thrust himself into
+the fore-front of the battle, and fell at least like a brave man.
+Whether Albinus, Boethius, and Symmachus did plot to bring in Justin;
+whether the senate did send a letter to him, I cannot tell.
+Boethius, in his De Consolatione, denies it all; and Boethius was a
+good man.  He says that the letters in which he hoped for the liberty
+of Rome were forged; how could he hope for the impossible? but he
+adds, 'would that any liberty could have been hoped for!  I would
+have answered the king as Cassius did, when falsely accused of
+conspiring by Caligula:  "If I had known of it, you should not."'
+One knows not whether Dietrich ever saw those words:  but they prove
+at least that all his confidence, justice, kindness to the patrician
+philosopher, had not won him from the pardonable conceit about the
+Romani nominis umbram.
+
+Boethius' story is most probably true.  One cannot think that that
+man would die with a lie in his mouth.  One cannot pass by, as the
+utterances of a deliberate hypocrisy, those touching appeals to his
+guiding mistress, that heavenly wisdom who has led him so long upon
+the paths of truth and virtue, and who seems to him, in his miserable
+cell, to have betrayed him in his hour of need.  Heaven forbid.
+Better to believe that Dietrich committed once in his life, a fearful
+crime, than that good Boethius' famous book is such another as the
+Eikon Basilike.
+
+Boethius, again, says that the Gothic courtiers hated him, and
+suborned branded scoundrels to swear away his life and that of the
+senate, because he had opposed 'the hounds of the palace,' Amigast,
+Trigulla, and other greedy barbarians.  There was, of course, a
+Gothic party and a Roman party about the court; and each hated the
+other bitterly.  Dietrich had favoured the Romans.  But the Goths
+could not have seen such men as Symmachus and Boethius the confidants
+and counsellors of the Amal, without longing for their downfall; and
+if, as Boethius and the Catholic historians say, the whole tragedy
+arose out of a Gothic plot to destroy the Roman party, such things
+have happened but too often in the world's history.  The only facts
+which make against the story are, that Cyprianus the accuser was a
+Roman, and that Cassiodorus, who must have belonged to the Roman
+party, not only is never mentioned during the whole tragedy, but was
+high in power under Theodatus and Athalaric afterwards.
+
+Add to this, that there were vague but wide-spread reports that the
+Goths were in danger; that Dietrich at least could not be ignorant of
+the ambition and the talents of that terrible Justinian, Justin's
+nephew, who was soon to alter, for a generation, the fortunes of the
+whole Empire, and to sweep the Goths from Italy; that men's minds
+must have been perplexed with fear of change, when they recollected
+that Dietrich was seventy years old, without a son to succeed him,
+and that a woman and a child would soon rule that great people in a
+crisis, which they could not but foresee.  We know that the ruin
+came; is it unreasonable to suppose that the Goths foresaw it, and
+made a desperate, it may be a treacherous, effort to crush once and
+for all, the proud and not less treacherous senators of Rome?
+
+So, maddened with the fancied discovery that the man whom he had
+honoured, trusted, loved, was conspiring against him, Dietrich sent
+Boethius to prison.  He seems, however, not to have been eager for
+his death; for Boethius remained there long enough to write his noble
+book.
+
+However, whether fresh proofs of his supposed guilt were discovered
+or not, the day came when he must die.  A cord was twisted round his
+head (probably to extort confession), till his eyes burst from their
+sockets, and then he was put out of his misery by a club; and so
+ended the last Roman philosopher.  Symmachus, his father-in-law, was
+beheaded; and Pope John, as we have heard, was thrown into prison on
+his return, and died after a few months.  These are the tragedies
+which have stained for ever the name of 'Theodoric the Great.'
+
+Pope John seems to have fairly earned his imprisonment.  For the two
+others, we can only, I fear, join in the sacred pity in which their
+memories have been embalmed to all succeeding generations.  But we
+must recollect, that after all, we know but one side of the question.
+The Romans could write; the Goths could not:  they may have been able
+to make out a fair case for themselves; they may have believed truly
+in the guilt of Boethius; and if they did, nothing less could have
+happened, by such rules of public law and justice as were then in
+vogue, than did happen.
+
+Be that as it may, the deed was done; and the punishment, if
+deserved, came soon enough.  Sitting at dinner (so the story runs),
+the head of a fish took in Dietrich's fancy the shape of Symmachus'
+head, the upper teeth biting the lip, the great eyes staring at him.
+He sprang up in horror; took to his bed; and there, complaining of a
+mortal chill, wrapping himself up in heaps of blankets, and bewailing
+to his physician the death of his two victims, he died sadly in a few
+days.  And a certain holy hermit, name not given, nor date of the
+vision, saw the ghosts of Boethius and Symmachus lead the Amal's soul
+up the cone of Stromboli, and hurl him in, as the English sailors saw
+old Boots, the Wapping usurer, hurled into the same place, for
+offences far more capable of proof.
+
+So runs the story of Dietrich's death.  It is perfectly natural, and
+very likely true.  His contemporaries, who all believed it, saw in it
+proof of his enormous guilt, and the manifest judgment of God.  We
+shall rather see in it a proof of the earnest, child-like, honest
+nature of the man, startled into boundless horror and self-abasement,
+by the sudden revelation of his crime.  Truly bad men die easier
+deaths than that; and go down to the grave, for the most part, blind
+and self-contented, and, as they think, unpunished; and perhaps
+forgiven.
+
+After Dietrich came the deluge.  The royal head was gone.  The royal
+heart remained in Amalasuentha 'the heavenly beauty,' a daughter
+worthy of her father.
+
+One of her first acts was to restore to the widows and children of
+the two victims the estates which Dietrich had confiscated.  That
+may, or may not, prove that she thought the men innocent.  She may
+have only felt it royal not to visit the sins of the fathers on the
+children; and those fathers, too, her own friends and preceptors.
+Beautiful, learned, and wise, she too was, like her father, before
+her age.  She, the pupil of Boethius, would needs bring up her son
+Athalaric in Roman learning, and favour the Romans in all ways; never
+putting to death or even fining any of them, and keeping down the
+rough Goths, who were ready enough, now Dietrich's hand was off them,
+to ill-use the conquered Italians.  The Goths soon grew to dislike
+her, and her Roman tendencies, her Roman education of the lad.  One
+day she boxed his ears for some fault.  He ran crying out into the
+Heldensaal, and complained to the heroes.  They sent a deputation to
+Amalasuentha, insolent enough.  'The boy should not be made a scholar
+of.'  'She meant to kill the boy and marry again.  Had not old
+Dietrich forbidden free Goths to go to schoolmasters, and said, that
+the boy who was taught to tremble at a cane, would never face a
+lance?'  So they took the lad away from the women, and made a ruffian
+of him.  What with drink, women, idleness, and the company of wild
+young fellows like himself, he was early ruined, body and soul.  Poor
+Amalasuentha, not knowing whither to turn, took the desperate
+resolution of offering Italy to the Emperor Justinian.  She did not
+know that her cousin Theodatus had been beforehand with her--a bad
+old man, greedy and unjust, whose rapacity she had had to control
+again and again, and who hated her in return.  Both send messages to
+Justinian.  The wily Emperor gave no direct answer:  but sent his
+ambassador to watch the course of events.  The young prince died of
+debauchery, and the Goths whispered that his mother had poisoned him.
+Meanwhile Theodatus went on from bad to worse; accusations flowed in
+to Amalasuentha of his lawless rapacity:  but he was too strong for
+her; and she, losing her head more and more, made the desperate
+resolve of marrying him, as the only way to keep him quiet.  He was
+the last male heir of the royal Amalungs.  The marriage would set him
+right in the eyes of the Goths, while it would free her from the
+suspicion of having murdered her son, in order to reign alone.
+Theodatus meanwhile was to have the name of royalty; but she was to
+keep the power and the money--a foolish, confused plan, which could
+have but one ending.  Theodatus married her of course, and then cast
+her into prison, seized all her treasures, and threw himself into the
+arms of that party among the Goths, who hated Amalasuentha for having
+punished their oppressions.  The end was swift and sad.  By the time
+that Justinian's ambassador landed, Amalasuentha was strangled in her
+bath; and all that Peter the ambassador had to do was, to catch at
+the cause of quarrel, and declare 'inexpiable war' on the part of
+Justinian, as the avenger of the Queen.
+
+And then began that dreadful East Goth war, which you may read for
+yourselves in the pages of an eye-witness, Procopius;--a war which
+destroyed utterly the civilization of Dietrich's long and prosperous
+reign, left Italy a desert, and exterminated the Roman people.
+
+That was the last woe:  but of it I must tell you in my next Lecture.
+
+
+
+LECTURE VI--THE NEMESIS OF THE GOTHS.
+
+
+
+Of this truly dreadful Gothic war I can give you but a hasty sketch;
+of some of the most important figures in it, not even a sketch.  I
+cannot conceive to myself, and therefore cannot draw for you, the
+famous Belisarius.  Was he really the strange compound of strength
+and weakness which Procopius, and after him Gibbon, represent him?--a
+caricature, for good and evil, of our own famous Marlborough?  You
+must read and judge for yourselves.  I cannot, at least as yet, offer
+you any solution of the enigma.
+
+Still less can I conceive to myself Narses, living till his grey
+hairs in the effeminate intrigues of the harem, and then springing
+forth a general; the Warrior Eunuch; the misanthrope avenging his
+great wrong upon all mankind in bloody battle-fields; dark of
+counsel, and terrible of execution; him to whom in after years the
+Empress Sophia sent word that he was more fit to spin among maids
+than to command armies, and he answered, that he would spin her such
+a thread as she could not unravel; and kept his word (as legends say)
+by inviting the Lombards into Italy.
+
+Least of all can I sketch Justinian the Great, the half-Teuton
+peasant, whom his uncle Justin sent for out of the Dardanian hills,
+to make him a demigod upon earth.  Men whispered in after years that
+he was born of a demon, a demon himself, passing whole days without
+food, wandering up and down his palace corridors all night, resolving
+dark things, and labouring all day with Herculean force to carry them
+out.  No wonder he was thought to be a demon, wedded to a demon-wife.
+The man is unfathomable, inexplicable;--marrying deliberately the
+wickedest of all women, plainly not for mere beauty's sake, but
+possibly because he saw in her a congenial intellect;--faithful and
+loving to her and she to him, amid all the crimes of their following
+years;--pious with exceeding devotion and orthodoxy, and yet with a
+piety utterly divorced from, unconscious of, the commonest morality;-
+-discerning and using the greatest men, Belisarius and Narses for
+example, and throwing them away again, surely not in weak caprice,
+whenever they served him too well;--conquering Persians, Vandals,
+Goths; all but re-conquering, in fact, the carcase Roman Empire;--and
+then trying (with a deep discernment of the value of Roman law) to
+put a galvanic life into the carcase by codifying that law.
+
+In whatever work I find this man, during his long life, he is to me
+inexplicable.  Louis XI of France is the man most like Justinian whom
+I know, but he, too, is a man not to be fathomed by me.  All the
+facts about Justinian you will find in Gibbon.  I have no theory by
+which to arrange and explain them, and therefore can tell you no more
+than Gibbon does.
+
+So to this Gothic war; which, you must remember, became possible for
+Justinian by Belisarius' having just destroyed the Vandals out of
+Africa.  It began by Belisarius invading the south of Italy.  Witigis
+was elected war-king of the Goths, 'the man of witty counsels,' who
+did not fulfil his name; while Theodatus (Theod-aht 'esteemed by the
+people' as his name meant) had fallen into utter disesteem, after
+some last villainy about money; had been struck down in the road by
+the man he had injured; and there had his throat cut, 'resupinus
+instar victimae jugulatus.'
+
+He had consulted a Jew diviner just before, who had given him a
+warning.  Thirty pigs, signifying the unclean Gentiles, the Jew shut
+up in three sties; naming ten Goths, ten Romans, and ten Imperialists
+of Belisarius' army, and left them to starve.  At the end they found
+dead all the Goths but two, hardly any of the Imperialists, and half
+the Romans:  but the five Roman pigs who were left had lost their
+bristles--bare to the skin, as the event proved.
+
+After that Theodatus had no heart to fight, and ended his dog's life
+by a dog's death, as we have seen.
+
+Note also this, that there was a general feeling of coming ruin; that
+there were quaint signs and omens.  We have heard of the pigs which
+warned the Goths.  Here is another.  There was a Mosaic picture of
+Theodoric at Naples; it had been crumbling to pieces at intervals,
+and every fresh downfall had marked the death of an Amal.  Now the
+last remains went down, to the very feet, and the Romans believed
+that it foretold the end of the Amal dynasty.  There was a Sibylline
+oracle too;
+
+
+'Quintili mense Roma nihil Geticum metuet.'
+
+
+Here, too, we find the last trace of heathenism, of that political
+mythology which had so inextricably interwoven itself with the life
+and history of the city.  The shrine of Janus was still standing, all
+of bronze, only just large enough, Procopius says, to contain the
+bronze image of Janus Bifrons.  The gates, during Christian
+centuries, had never been opened, even in war time.  Now people went
+by night, and tried to force them open:  but hardly succeeded.
+
+Belisarius garrisoned Rome, and the Goths attacked it, but in vain.
+You must read the story of that famous siege in the really brilliant
+pages of old Procopius, the last good historian of the old world.
+
+Moreover, and this is most important, Belisarius raised the native
+population against the Goths.  As he had done in Africa, when in one
+short campaign he utterly destroyed the now effeminate aristocracy of
+the Vandals, so he did in Italy.  By real justice and kindness; by
+proclaiming himself the deliverer of the conquered from the yoke of
+foreign tyrants, he isolated the slave-holding aristocracy of the
+Goths from the mass of the inhabitants of Italy.
+
+Belisarius and the Goths met, and the Goths conquered.  But to take
+Rome was beyond their power; and after that a long miserable war
+struggled and wrangled up and down over the wretched land; city after
+city was taken and destroyed, now by Roman, now by Goth.  The lands
+lay waste, the people disappeared in tens of thousands.  All great
+Dietrich's work of thirty years was trampled into mud.
+
+There were horrible sieges and destructions by both parties;--sack of
+Milan by Goths, sack of Rimini and the country round by Romans;
+horrors of famine at Auximum; two women who kept an inn, killing and
+eating seventeen men, till the eighteenth discovered the trap and
+killed them.  Everywhere, as I say, good Dietrich's work of thirty
+years trampled into gory mud.
+
+Then Theudebert and his false Franks came down to see what they could
+get; all (save a few knights round the king) on foot, without bow or
+lance; but armed with sword, shield, and heavy short-handled double-
+edged francisc, or battle-axe.  At the bridge over the Ticinus they
+(nominal Catholics) sacrificed Gothic women and children with horrid
+rites, fought alike Goths and Romans, lost a third of their army by
+dysentery, and went home again.
+
+At last, after more horrors, Vitigis and his Goths were driven into
+Ravenna.  Justinian treated for peace; and then followed a strange
+peripeteia, which we have, happily, from an eye-witness, Procopius
+himself.  The Roman generals outside confessed their chance of
+success hopeless.  The Goths inside, tired of the slow Vitigis, send
+out to the great Belisarius, Will he be their king?  King over them
+there in Italy?  He promised, meaning to break his promise; and to
+the astonishment and delight of the Romans, the simple and honest
+barbarians opened the gates of Ravenna, and let in him and his
+Romans, to find themselves betrayed and enslaved.  'When I saw our
+troops march in,' says Procopius, 'I felt it was God's doing, so to
+turn their minds.  The Goths,' he says, 'were far superior in numbers
+and in strength; and their women, who had fancied these Romans to be
+mighty men of valour, spit in the faces of their huge husbands, and
+pointing to the little Romans, reproached them with having
+surrendered to such things as that.'  But the folly was committed.
+Belisarius carried them away captive to Constantinople, and so ended
+the first act of the Gothic war.
+
+In the moment of victory the envy of the Byzantine court undid all
+that it had done.  Belisarius returned with his captives to Rome, not
+for a triumph, but for a disgrace; and Italy was left open to the
+Goths, if they had men and heart to rise once more.
+
+And they did rise.  Among the remnant of the race was left a hero,
+Totila by name;--a Teuton of the ancient stamp.  Totilas, 'free from
+death'--'the deathless one,' they say his name means.  Under him the
+nation rose once more as out of the ground.
+
+A Teuton of the ancient stamp he was, just and merciful exceedingly.
+Take but two instances of him, and know the man by them.  He retook
+Naples.  The Romans within were starving.  He fed them; but lest they
+should die of the sudden repletion, he kept them in by guards at each
+gate, and fed them up more and more each day, till it was safe to let
+them out, to find food for themselves in the country.  A Roman came
+to complain that a Goth had violated his daughter.  He shall die,
+said Totila.  He shall not die, said the Goths.  He is a valiant
+hero.  They came clamouring to the king.  He answered them quietly
+and firmly.  They may choose to-day, whether to let this man go
+unpunished, or to save the Gothic nation and win the victory.  Do
+they not recollect how at the beginning of the war, they had brave
+soldiers, famous generals, countless treasures, horses, weapons, and
+all the forts of Italy?  And yet under Theodatus, a man who loved
+gold better than justice, they had so angered God by their
+unrighteous lives, that--what had happened they knew but too well.
+Now God had seemed to have avenged himself on them enough.  He had
+begun a new course with them.  They must begin a new course with him;
+and justice was the only path.  As for the man's being a valiant
+hero:  let them know that the unjust and the ravisher were never
+brave in fight; but that according to a man's life, such was his luck
+in battle.
+
+His noble words came all but true.  The feeble generals who were
+filling Belisarius's place were beaten one by one, and almost all
+Italy was reconquered.  Belisarius had to be sent back again to
+Italy:  but the envy, whether of Justinian himself, or of the two
+wicked women who ruled his court, allowed him so small a force that
+he could do nothing.
+
+Totila and the Goths came down once more to Rome.  Belisarius in
+agony sent for reinforcements, and got them; but too late.  He could
+not relieve Rome.  The Goths had massed themselves round the city,
+and Belisarius, having got to Ostia (Portus) at the Tiber's mouth,
+could get no further.  This was the last woe; the actual death-agony
+of ancient Rome.  The famine grew and grew.  The wretched Romans
+cried to Bessas and his garrison, either to feed them or to kill them
+out of their misery.  They would do neither.  They could hardly at
+last feed themselves.  The Romans ate nettles off the ruins, and
+worse things still.  There was not a dog or a rat left.  They even
+killed themselves.  One father of five children could bear no longer
+their cries for food.  He wrapped his head in his mantle, and sprang
+into the Tiber, while the children looked on.  The survivors wandered
+about like spectres, brown with hunger, and dropped dead with half-
+chewed nettles between their lips.  To this, says Procopius, had
+fortune brought the Roman senate and people.  Nay, not fortune, but
+wickedness.  They had wished to play at being free, while they
+themselves were the slaves of sin.
+
+And still Belisarius was coming,--and still he did not come.  He was
+forcing his way up the Tiber; he had broken Totila's chain, burnt a
+tower full of Goths, and the city was on the point of being relieved,
+when one Isaac made a fool of himself, and was taken by the Goths.
+Belisarius fancied that Portus, his base of operations, with all his
+supplies, and Antonia, the worthless wife on whom he doted, were
+gone.  He lost his head, was beaten terribly, fell back on Ostia, and
+then the end came.  Isaurians from within helped in Goths by night.
+The Asinarian gate was opened, and Rome was in the hands of the
+Goths.
+
+And what was left?  What of all the pomp and glory, the spoils of the
+world, the millions of inhabitants?
+
+Five or six senators, who had taken refuge in St. Peter's, and some
+five hundred of the plebs; Pope Pelagius crouching at Totila's feet,
+and crying for mercy; and Rusticiana, daughter of Symmachus,
+Boethius' widow, with other noble women, in slaves' rags, knocking
+without shame at door after door to beg a bit of bread.  And that was
+what was left of Rome.
+
+Gentlemen, I make no comment.  I know no more awful page in the
+history of Europe.  Through such facts as these God speaks.  Let man
+be silent; and look on in fear and trembling, knowing that it was
+written of old time--The wages of sin are death.
+
+The Goths wanted to kill Rusticiana.  She had sent money to the Roman
+generals; she had thrown down Dietrich's statues, in revenge for the
+death of her father and her husband.  Totila would not let them touch
+her.  Neither maid, wife, nor widow, says Procopius, was the worse
+for any Goth.
+
+Next day he called the heroes together.  He is going to tell them the
+old tale, he says--How in Vitigis' time at Ravenna, 7000 Greeks had
+conquered and robbed of kingdom and liberty 200,000 rich and well-
+armed Goths.  And now that they were raw levies, few, naked,
+wretched, they had conquered more than 20,000 of the enemy.  And why?
+Because of old they had looked to everything rather than to justice;
+they had sinned against each other and the Romans.  Therefore they
+must choose, and be just men henceforth, and have God with them, or
+unjust, and have God against them.
+
+Then he sends for the wretched remnant of the senators and tells them
+the plain truth:- How the great Dietrich and his successors had
+heaped them with honour and wealth; and how they had returned his
+benefits by bringing in the Greeks.  And what had they gained by
+changing Dietrich for Justinian?  Logothetes, who forced them by
+blows to pay up the money which they had already paid to their Gothic
+rulers; and revenue exacted alike in war and in peace.  Slaves they
+deserve to be; and slaves they shall be henceforth.
+
+Then he sends to Justinian.  He shall withdraw his army from Italy,
+and make peace with him.  He will be his ally and his son in arms, as
+Dietrich had been to the Emperors before him, or if not, he will kill
+the senate, destroy Rome, and march into Illyricum.
+
+Justinian leaves it to Belisarius.
+
+Then Totila begins to destroy Rome.  He batters down the walls, he is
+ready to burn the town.  He will turn the evil place into a sheep-
+pasture.  Belisarius flatters and cajoles him from his purpose, and
+he marches away with all his captives, leaving not a living soul in
+Rome.
+
+But Totila shews himself a general unable to cope with that great
+tactician.  He divides his forces, and allows Belisarius to start out
+of Ostia and fortify himself in Rome.  The Goths are furious at his
+rashness:  but it is too late, and the war begins again, up and down
+the wretched land, till Belisarius is recalled by some fresh court
+intrigue of his wicked wife, and another and even more terrible enemy
+appears on the field, Narses the eunuch, avenging his wrong upon his
+fellow-men by cunning and courage almost preternatural.  He comes
+upon them with a mighty host:  but not of Romans alone.  He has
+gathered the Teuton tribes;--Herules, the descendants probably of
+Odoacer's confederates; Gepids, who have a long blood-feud against
+the Goths; and most terrible of all, Alboin with his five thousand
+more Burgundians, of whom you will hear enough hereafter.  We read
+even of multitudes of Huns, and even of Persian deserters from the
+Chosroo.  But Narses' policy is the old Roman one--Teuton must
+destroy Teuton.  And it succeeds.
+
+In spite of some trouble with the Franks, who are holding Venetia, he
+marches down victorious through the wasted land, and Totila marches
+to meet him in the Apennines.  The hero makes his last speech.  He
+says, 'There will be no need to talk henceforth.  This day will end
+the war.  They are not to fear these hired Huns, Herules, Lombards,
+fighting for money.  Let them hold together like desperate men.'  So
+they fight it out.  The Goths depending entirely on the lance, the
+Romans on a due use of every kind of weapon.  The tremendous charge
+of the Gothic knights is stopped by showers of Hun and Herule arrows,
+and they roll back again and again in disorder on the foot:  but in
+spite of the far superior numbers of the Romans, it is not till
+nightfall that Narses orders a general advance of his line.  The
+Goths try one last charge; but appalled by the numbers of the enemy,
+break up, and, falling back on the foot, throw them into confusion,
+and all is lost.
+
+The foot are cut down flying.  The knights ride for their lives.
+Totila and five horsemen are caught up by Asbad the Gepid chief.
+Asbad puts his lance in rest, not knowing who was before him.  'Dog,'
+cries Totila's page, 'wilt thou strike thy lord?'  But it is too
+late.  Asbad's lance goes through his back, and he drops on his
+horse's neck.  Scipwar (Shipward) the Goth wounds Asbad, and falls
+wounded himself.  The rest carry off Totila.  He dies that night,
+after reigning eleven stormy years.
+
+The Goths flee across the Po.  There is one more struggle for life,
+and one more hero left.  Teia by name, 'the slow one,' slow, but
+strong.  He shall be king now.  They lift him on the shield, and
+gather round him desperate, but determined to die hard.  He finds the
+treasure of Totila, hid in Pisa.  He sends to Theudebald and his
+Franks.  Will they help him against the Roman, and they shall have
+the treasure; the last remnant of the Nibelungen hoard.  No.  The
+Luegenfelden will not come.  They will stand by and see the butchery,
+on the chance of getting all Italy for themselves.  Narses storms
+Rome--or rather a little part of it round Hadrian's Mole, which the
+Goths had fortified; and the Goths escape down into Campania, mad
+with rage.
+
+That victory of Narses, says Procopius, brought only a more dreadful
+destruction on the Roman senate and people.  The Goths, as they go
+down, murder every Roman they meet.  The day of grace which Totila
+had given them is over.  The Teutons in Narses' army do much the
+same.  What matter to Burgunds and Herules who was who, provided they
+had any thing to be plundered of?  Totila has allowed many Roman
+senators to live in Campania.  They hear that Narses has taken Rome,
+they begin to flock to the ghastly ruin.  Perhaps there will be once
+again a phantom senate, phantom consuls, under the Romani nominis
+umbram.  The Goths catch them, and kill them to a man.  And there is
+an end of the Senatus Populusque Romanus.
+
+The end is near now.  And yet these terrible Goths cannot be killed
+out of the way.  On the slopes of Vesuvius, by Nuceria, they fortify
+a camp; and as long as they are masters of the neighbouring sea, for
+two months they keep Narses at bay.  At last he brings up an
+innumerable fleet, cuts off their supplies; and then the end comes.
+The Goths will die like desperate men on foot.  They burst out of
+camp, turn their horses loose, after the fashion of German knights--
+One hears of the fashion again and again in the middle age,--and rush
+upon the enemy in deep solid column.  The Romans have hardly time to
+form some sort of line; and then not the real Romans, I presume, but
+the Burgunds and Gepids, turn their horses loose like the Goths.
+There is no need for tactics; the fight is hand to hand; every man,
+says Procopius, rushing at the man nearest him.
+
+For a third of the day Teia fights in front, sheltered by his long
+pavisse, stabbing with a mighty lance at the mob which makes at him,
+as dogs at a boar at bay.  Procopius is awed by the man.  Most
+probably he saw him with his own eyes.  Second in valour, he says, to
+none of the Heroes.
+
+Again and again his shield is full of darts.  Without moving a foot,
+without turning an inch right or left, says Procopius, he catches
+another from his shield-bearer, and fights on.  At last he has twelve
+lances in his shield, and cannot move it:  coolly he calls for a
+fresh one, as if he were fixed to the soil, thrusts back the enemy
+with his left hand, and stabs at them with his right.  But his time
+is come.  As he shifts his shield for a moment his chest is exposed,
+and a javelin is through him.  And so ends the last hero of the East
+Goths.  They put his head upon a pole, and carry it round the lines
+to frighten the Goths.  The Goths are long past frightening.
+
+All day long, and all the next day, did the Germans fight on, Burgund
+and Gepid against Goth, neither giving nor taking quarter, each man
+dying where he stood, till human strength could bear up no longer,
+while Narses sat by, like an ugly Troll as he was, smiling to see the
+Teuton slay the Teuton, for the sake of their common enemy.  Then the
+Goths sent down to Narses.  They were fighting against God.  They
+would give in, and go their ways peaceably, and live with some other
+Teuton nations after their own laws.  They had had enough of Italy,
+poor fellows, and of the Nibelungen hoard.  Only Narses, that they
+might buy food on the journey back, must let them have their money,
+which he had taken in various towns of Italy.
+
+Narses agreed.  There was no use fighting more with desperate men.
+They should go in peace.  And he kept his faith with them.  Perhaps
+he dared not break it.  He let them go, like a wounded lion crawling
+away from the hunter, up through Italy, and over the Po, to vanish.
+They and their name became absorbed in other nations, and history
+knows the East Goths no more.
+
+So perished, by their own sins, a noble nation; and in perishing,
+destroyed utterly the Roman people.  After war and famine followed as
+usual dreadful pestilence, and Italy lay waste for years.  Henceforth
+the Italian population was not Roman, but a mixture of all races,
+with a most powerful, but an entirely new type of character.  Rome
+was no more Senatorial, but Papal.
+
+And why did these Goths perish, in spite of all their valour and
+patriotism, at the hands of mercenaries?
+
+They were enervated, no doubt, as the Vandals had been in Africa, by
+the luxurious southern climate, with its gardens, palaces, and wines.
+But I have indicated a stronger reason already:- they perished
+because they were a slave-holding aristocracy.
+
+We must not blame them.  All men then held slaves:  but the original
+sin was their ruin, though they knew it not.  It helped, doubtless,
+to debauch them; to tempt them to the indulgence of those fierce and
+greedy passions, which must, in the long run, lower the morality of
+slaveholders; and which, as Totila told them, had drawn down on them
+the anger of heaven.  But more; though they reformed their morals,
+and that nobly, under the stern teaching of affliction, that could
+not save them.  They were ruined by the inherent weakness of all
+slaveholding states; the very weakness which had ruined, in past
+years, the Roman Empire.  They had no middle class, who could keep up
+their supplies, by exercising for them during war the arts of peace.
+They had no lower class, whom they dare entrust with arms, and from
+whom they might recruit their hosts.  They could not call a whole
+population into the field, and when beaten in that field, carry on,
+as Britain would when invaded, a guerilla warfare from wood to wood,
+and hedge to hedge, as long as a coign of vantage-ground was left.
+They found themselves a small army of gentlemen, chivalrous and
+valiant, as slaveholders of our race have always been; but lessening
+day by day from battle and disease, with no means of recruiting their
+numbers; while below them and apart from them lay the great mass of
+the population, helpless, unarmed, degraded, ready to side with any
+or every one who would give them bread, or let them earn it for
+themselves (for slaves must eat, even though their masters starve),
+and careless of, if not even hostile to, their masters' interests,
+the moment those masters were gone to the wars.
+
+In such a case, nothing was before them, save certain defeat at last
+by an enemy who could pour in ever fresh troops of mercenaries, and
+who had the command of the seas.
+
+I may seem to be describing the case of a modern and just as valiant
+and noble a people.  I do not mention its name.  The parallel, I
+fear, is too complete, not to have already suggested itself to you.
+
+
+
+LECTURE VII--PAULUS DIACONUS
+
+
+
+And now I come to the final settlement of Italy and the Lombard race;
+and to do that well, I must introduce you to-day to an old
+chronicler--a very valuable, and as far as we know, faithful writer--
+Paul Warnefrid, alias Paul the Deacon.
+
+I shall not trouble you with much commentary on him; but let him, as
+much as possible, tell his own story.  He may not be always quite
+accurate, but you will get no one more accurate.  In the long run,
+you will know nothing about the matter, save what he tells you; so be
+content with what you can get.  Let him shew you what sort of an
+account of his nation, and the world in general, a Lombard gentleman
+and clergyman could give, at the end of the 8th century.
+
+You recollect the Lombards, of whom Tacitus says, 'Longobardos
+paucitas nobilitat.'  Paulus Warnefrid was one of their descendants,
+and his history carries out the exact truth of Tacitus' words.  He
+too speaks of them as a very small tribe.  He could not foresee how
+much the 'nobilitat' meant.  He knew his folk as a brave semi-feudal
+race, who had conquered the greater part of Italy, and tilled and
+ruled it well; who were now conquered by Charlemagne, and annexed to
+the great Frank Empire, but without losing anything of their
+distinctive national character.  He did not foresee that they would
+become the architects, the merchants, the goldsmiths, the bankers,
+the scientific agriculturists of all Europe.  We know it.  Whenever
+in London or any other great city, you see a 'Lombard Street,' an old
+street of goldsmiths and bankers--or the three golden balls of
+Lombardy over a pawnbroker's shop--or in the country a field of rye-
+grass, or a patch of lucerne--recollect this wise and noble people,
+and thank the Lombards for what they have done for mankind.
+
+Paulus is a garrulous historian, but a valuable one, just because he
+is garrulous.  Though he turned monk and deacon in middle life, he
+has not sunk the man in the monk, and become a cosmopolite, like most
+Roman ecclesiastics, who have no love or hate for human beings save
+as they are friends or enemies of the pope, or their own abbey.  He
+has retained enough of the Lombard gentleman to be proud of his
+family, his country, and the old legends of his race, which he tells,
+half-ashamed, but with evident enjoyment.
+
+He was born at beautiful Friuli, with the jagged snow-line of the
+Alps behind him, and before him the sun and the sea, and the plains
+of Po; he was a courtier as a boy in Desiderius' court at Pavia, and
+then, when Charlemagne destroyed the Lombard monarchy, seems to have
+been much with the great king at Aix.  He certainly ended his life as
+a Benedictine monk, at Monte Casino, about 799; having written a Life
+of St. Gregory; Homilies long and many; the Appendix to Eutropius
+(the Historia Miscella, as it is usually called) up to Justinian's
+time; and above all, this history of the Lombards, his forefathers,
+which I shall take as my text.
+
+To me, and I believe to the great German antiquaries, his history
+seems a model history of a nation.  You watch the people and their
+story rise before you out of fable into fact; out of the dreary
+darkness of the unknown north, into the clear light of civilized
+Roman history.
+
+The first chapter is 'Of Germany, how it nourishes much people, and
+therefore many nations go forth of it.'  The reason which he gives
+for the immense population is significant.  The further to the north,
+and the colder, the more healthy he considers the world to be, and
+more fit for breeding human beings; whereas the south, being nearer
+to the heat of the sun, always abounds with diseases.  The fact
+really is, I presume, that Italy (all the south which he knew), and
+perhaps most of the once Roman empire, were during the 6th and 7th
+centuries pestilential.  Ruined cities, stopt watercourses,
+cultivated land falling back into marsh and desert, a soil too often
+saturated with human corpses--offered all the elements for
+pestilence.  If the once populous Campagna of Rome be now
+uninhabitable from malaria, what must it have been in Paul
+Warnefrid's time?
+
+Be that as it may, this is his theory.
+
+Then he tells us how his people were at first called Winils; and how
+they came out of Scania Insula.  Sweden is often, naturally, an
+island with the early chroniclers; only the south was known to them.
+The north was magical, unknown, Quenland, the dwelling-place of
+Yotuns, Elves, Trolls, Scratlings, and all other uncanny
+inhumanities.  The Winils find that they are growing too many for
+Scanland, and they divide into three parties.  Two shall stay behind,
+and the third go out to seek their fortunes.  Which shall go is to be
+decided by lot.  The third on whom the lot falls choose as war-kings,
+two brothers, Ayo and Ibor, and with them their mother, Gambara, the
+Alruna-wife, prudent and wise exceedingly--and they go forth.
+
+But before Paul can go too, he has a thing or two to say, which he
+must not forget, about the wild mysterious north from which his
+forefathers came.  First how, in those very extreme parts of Germany,
+in a cave on the ocean shore, lie the seven sleepers.  How they got
+thither from Ephesus, I cannot tell, still less how they should be at
+once there on the Baltic shore, and at Ephesus--as Mohammed himself
+believed, and Edward the Confessor taught--and at Marmoutier by
+Tours, and probably elsewhere beside.  Be that as it may, there they
+are, the seven martyrs, sleeping for ever in their Roman dresses,
+which some wild fellow tried to pull off once, and had his arms
+withered as a punishment.  And Paul trusts that they will awake some
+day, and by their preaching save the souls of the heathen Wends and
+Finns who haunt those parts.
+
+The Teutonic knights, however, and not the seven sleepers, did that
+good work.
+
+Only their dog is not with them, it appears;--the sacred dog which
+watches them till the judgment day, when it is to go up to heaven,
+with Noah's dove, and Balaam's ass, and Alborah the camel, and all
+the holy beasts.  The dog must have been left behind at Ephesus.
+
+Then he must tell us about the Scritofinns of the Bothnia gulf; wild
+Lapps and Finns, who have now retreated before the Teutonic race.  In
+Paul Warnefrid's eyes they are little wild hopping creatures--whence
+they derive their name, he says--Scritofinns, the hopping, or
+scrambling Finns.
+
+Scrattels, Skretles, often figure in the Norse tales as hopping
+dwarfs, half magical {p158}.  The Norse discoverers of America
+recognized the Skraellings in the Esquimaux, and fled from them in
+panic terror; till that furious virago Freydisa, Thorvard's wife, and
+Eirek the Red's daughter, caught up a dead man's sword, and put to
+flight, single-handed, the legion of little imps.
+
+Others, wiser, or too wise, say that Paul is wrong; that Skrikfins is
+the right name, so called from their 'screeking', screaming, and
+jabbering, which doubtless the little fellows did, loudly enough.
+
+Be that as it may, they appear to Paul (or rather to his informants,
+Wendish merchants probably, who came down to Charlemagne's court at
+Aix, to sell their amber and their furs) as hopping about, he says,
+after the rein-deer, shooting them with a little clumsy bow, and
+arrows tipt with bone, and dressing themselves in their skins.
+Procopius knew these Scritfins too (but he has got (as usual) addled
+in his geography, and puts them in ultima Thule or Shetland), and
+tells us, over and above the reindeer-skin dresses, that the women
+never nursed their children, but went out hunting with their
+husbands, hanging the papoose up to a tree, as the Lapps do now, with
+a piece of deer's marrow in its mouth to keep it employed; and
+moreover, that they sacrificed their captives to a war-god (Mars he
+calls him) in cruel ugly ways.  All which we may fully believe.
+
+Then Paul has to tell us how in the Scritfin country there is little
+or no night in midsummer, little or no day in winter; and how the
+shadows there are exceeding long, and shorten to nothing as they
+reach the equator,--where he puts not merely Egypt, but Jerusalem.
+And how on Christmas days a man's shadow is nine feet long in Italy,
+whereas at Totonis Villam (Thionville), as he himself has measured,
+it is nineteen feet and a half.  Because, he says, shrewdly enough,
+the further you go from the sun, the nearer the sun seems to the
+horizon.  Of all which if you answer--But this is not history:  I
+shall reply--But it is better than history.  It is the history of
+history.  It helps you to see how the world got gradually known; how
+history got gradually to be written; how each man, in each age, added
+his little grain to the great heap of facts, and gave his rough
+explanation thereof; and how each man's outlook upon this wondrous
+world grew wider, clearer, juster, as the years rolled on.
+
+And therefore I have no objection at all to listen to Paul in his
+next chapter, concerning the two navels of the ocean, one on each
+side Britain--abysses which swallow up the water twice a day, and
+twice a day spout it up again.  Paul has seen, so he seems to say,
+the tide, the [Greek text which cannot be reproduced], that
+inexplicable wonder of the old Greeks and Romans, running up far
+inland at the mouths of the Seine and Loire; and he has to get it
+explained somehow, before he can go forward with a clear conscience.
+One of the navels seems to be the Mahlstrom in Norway.  Of the place
+of the other there is no doubt.  It is close to Evodia insula,
+seemingly Alderney.  For a high noble of the French told him so; he
+was sucked into it, ships and all, and only escaped by clinging to a
+rock.  And after awhile the margins of that abyss were all left bare,
+leaving the Frenchman high and dry, 'palpitating so with fear,' says
+Paul, 'that he could hardly keep his seat.'  But when all the water
+had been sucked in, out and up it came pouring again, in huge
+mountains, and upon them the Frenchman's ships, to his intense
+astonishment, reappeared out of the bottomless pit; into one of which
+he jumped; being, like a true Frenchman, thoroughly master of the
+situation; and got safe home to tell Paul the deacon.  It is not
+quite the explanation of the tides which one would have wished for:
+but if a French nobleman of high rank will swear that he saw it with
+his own eyes, what can Paul do, in common courtesy, but believe him?
+
+Paul has observed, too, which is a fact, that there is a small tide
+in his own Adriatic; and suggests modestly that there may be a
+similar hole in the bottom of that sea, only a little one, the tide
+being very little.  After which, 'his praelibatis,' he will return,
+he says, to his story.  And so he goes back to the famous Langbard
+Saga, the old story, which he has turned out of living Teutonic verse
+into dead Latin prose, and calls De Woden et Frea quaedam ridicula
+fabula; but can't help for the life of him telling it, apologizing
+all the time.  How the Winils (his own folk) went out to fight the
+Wendels, many more than them in number; and how Gambara, the Alruna-
+wife, cried to Freia the goddess, and Freia told her that whichsoever
+of the two armies first greeted Woden at the sunrise should win.  But
+the Winils are far away on the war-road, and there is no time to send
+to them.  So Freia bids her take the Winil women, and dress them as
+warriors, and plait their tresses over their lips for beards, and cry
+to Woden; and Woden admires their long beards, and thinks them such
+valiant 'war-beasts,' that he grants them the victory.
+
+Then Freia tells him how he has been taken in, and the old god laughs
+till the clouds rattle again, and the Winils are called Langbardr
+ever after.
+
+But then comes in the antiquary, and says that the etymology is
+worthless, and that Langbardr means long axes--(bard=an axe)--a word
+which we keep in halbert, a hall-axe, or guard's pole-axe; and
+perhaps the antiquary is right.
+
+But again comes in a very learned man, Dr. Latham {p162}, and more
+than hints that the name is derived from the Lange Borde, the long
+meadows by the side of the Elbe:  and so a good story crumbles to
+pieces, and
+
+
+   'All charms do fly
+Beneath the touch of cold philosophy.'
+
+
+Then follows another story, possibly from another saga.  How by
+reason of a great famine they had to leave Scoringia, the shore-land,
+and go into Mauringia, a word which Mr. Latham connects with the
+Merovingi, or Meerwing conquerors of Gaul.  Others say that it means
+the moorland, others something else.  All that they will ever find
+out we may see for ourselves already.--A little tribe of valiant
+fair-haired men, whether all Teutons, or, as Mr. Latham thinks,
+Sclavonians with Teuton leaders, still intimately connected with our
+own English race both by their language and their laws, struggling
+for existence on the bleak brown bogs and moors, sowing a little
+barley and flax, feeding a few rough cattle, breeding a few great
+black horses; generation after generation fighting their way
+southward, as they exhausted the barren northern soils, or became too
+numerous for their marches, or found land left waste in front of them
+by the emigration of some Suevic, Vandal, or Burgund tribe.  We know
+nothing about them, and never shall know, save that they wore white
+linen gaiters, and carried long halberts, or pole-axes, and had each
+an immortal soul in him, as dear to God as yours or mine, with
+immense unconscious capabilities, which their children have proved
+right well.
+
+Then comes another saga, how they met the Assipitti, of whom, whether
+they were Tacitus's Usipetes, of the Lower Rhine, or Asabiden, the
+remnant of the Asen, who went not to Scandinavia with Odin, we know
+not, and need not know; and how the Assipitti would not let them
+pass; and how they told the Lombards that they had dogheaded men in
+their tribe who drank men's blood, which Mr. Latham well explains by
+pointing out, in the Traveller's Song, a tribe of Hundings
+(Houndings) sons of the hound; and how the Lombards sent out a
+champion, who fought the champion of the Assipitti, and so gained
+leave to go on their way.
+
+Forward they go, toward the south-east, seemingly along the German
+marches, the debateable land between Teuton and Sclav, which would,
+mechanically speaking, be the line of least resistance.  We hear of
+Gothland--wherever that happened to be just then; of Anthaib, the
+land held by the Sclavonian Anten, and Bathaib, possibly the land
+held by the Gepidae, or remnant of the Goths who bided behind (as
+Wessex men still say), while the Goths moved forward; and then of
+Burgundhaib, wherever the Burgunds might be then.  I know not; and I
+will dare to say, no man can exactly know.  For no dates are given,
+and how can they be?  The Lombards have not yet emerged out of the
+dismal darkness of the north into the light of Roman civilization;
+and all the history they have are a few scraps of saga.
+
+At last they take a king of the family of the Gungings, Agilmund, son
+of Ayo, like the rest of the nations, says Jornandes; for they will
+be no more under duces, elective war-kings.  And then follows a fresh
+saga (which repeats itself in the myths of several nations), how a
+woman has seven children at a birth, and throws them for shame into a
+pond; and Agilmund the king, riding by, stops to see, and turns them
+over with his lance; and one of the babes lays hold thereof; and the
+king says, 'This will be a great man;' and takes him out of the pond,
+and calls him Lamissohn, 'the son of the fishpond,' (so it is
+interpreted;) who grows to be a mighty Kemper-man, and slays an
+Amazon.  For when they come to a certain river, the Amazons forbid
+them to pass, unless they will fight their she-champion; and
+Lamissohn swims over and fights the war-maiden, and slays her; and
+they go on and come into a large land and quiet, somewhere about
+Silesia, it would seem, and abode there a long while.
+
+Then down on them come the savage Bulgars by night, and slay king
+Agilmund, and carry off his daughter; and Lamissohn follows them, and
+defeats them with a great slaughter, and is made king; and so forth:
+till at last they have got--how we shall never know--near history and
+historic lands.  For when Odoacer and his Turklings and other
+confederates went up into Rugiland, the country north of Vienna, and
+destroyed the Rugians, and Fava their king, then the Lombards went
+down into the waste land of the Rugians, because it was fertile, and
+abode there certain years.
+
+Then they moved on again, we know not why, and dwelt in the open
+plains, which are called feld.  One says 'Moravia;' but that they had
+surely left behind.  Rather it is the western plain of Hungary about
+Comorn.  Be that as it may, they quarrelled there with the Heruli.
+Eutropius says that they paid the Herules tribute for the land, and
+offered to pay more, if the Herules would not attack them.  Paul
+tells a wild saga, or story, of the Lombard king's daughter insulting
+a Herule prince, because he was short of stature:  he answered by
+some counter-insult; and she, furious, had him stabbed from behind
+through a window as he sat with his back to it.  Then war came.  The
+Herules, old and practised warriors, trained in the Roman armies,
+despised the wild Lombards, and disdained to use armour against them,
+fighting with no clothes save girdles.  Rodulf their king, too
+certain of victory, sat playing at tables, and sent a man up a tree
+to see how the fight went, telling him that he would cut his head off
+if he said that the Herules fled; and then, touched by some secret
+anxiety as to the end, spoke the fatal words himself; and a madness
+from God came on the Herules; and when they came to a field of flax,
+they took the blue flowers for water, and spread out their arms to
+swim through, and were all slaughtered defencelessly.
+
+Then they fought with the Suevi; and their kings' daughters married
+with the kings of the Franks; and then ruled Aldwin (a name which Dr.
+Latham identifies with our English Eadwin, or Edwin, 'the noble
+conqueror,' though Grotius translates it Audwin, 'the old or auld
+conqueror'), who brought them over the Danube into Pannonia, between
+the Danube and the Drave, about the year 526.  Procopius says, that
+they came by a grant from the Emperor Justinian, who gave as wife to
+Aldwin a great niece of Dietrich the Good, carried captive with
+Witigis to Byzant.
+
+Thus at last they too have reached the forecourt of the Roman Empire,
+and are waiting for their turn at the Nibelungen hoard.  They have
+one more struggle, the most terrible of all; and then they will be
+for a while the most important people of the then world.
+
+The Gepidae are in Hungary before them, now a great people.  Ever
+since they helped to beat the Huns at Netad, they have been holding
+Attila's old kingdom for themselves and not attempting to move
+southward into the Empire; so fulfilling their name.
+
+There is continual desultory war; Justinian, according to Procopius'
+account, playing false with each, in order to make them destroy each
+other.  Then, once (this is Procopius' story, not Paul's) they meet
+for a great fight; and both armies run away by a panic terror; and
+Aldwin the Lombard and Thorisend the Gepid are left alone, face to
+face.--It is the hand of God, say the two wild kings--God does not
+mean these two peoples to destroy each other.  So they make a truce
+for two years.  Then the Gepidae call in Cutuguri, a Hunnic tribe, to
+help them; then, says Procopius, Aldwin, helped by Roman mercenaries,
+under Amalfrid the Goth, Theodoric's great nephew, and brother-in-law
+of Aldwin, has a great fight with the Gepidae.  But Paul knows naught
+of all this:  with him it is not Aldwin, but Alboin his son, who
+destroys the Gepidae.  Alboin, Grotius translates as Albe-win, 'he
+who wins all:' but Dr. Latham, true to his opinion that the Lombards
+and the Angles were closely connected, identifies it with our
+AElfwine, 'the fairy conqueror.'
+
+Aldwin, Paul says, and Thorisend fought in the Asfeld,--wherever that
+may be,--and Alboin the Lombard prince slew Thorisend the Gepid
+prince, and the Gepidae were defeated with a great slaughter.
+
+Then young Alboin asked his father to let him sit at the table with
+him.  No, he could not do that, by Lombard custom, till he has become
+son-at-arms to some neighbouring king.
+
+Young Alboin takes forty thanes, and goes off to Thorisend's court,
+as the guest of his enemy.  The rites of hospitality are sacred.  The
+king receives him, feasts him, seats him, the slayer of his son, in
+his dead son's place.  And as he looks on him he sighs; and at last
+he can contain no longer.  The seat, he says, I like right well:  but
+not the man who sits in it.  One of his sons takes fire, and begins
+to insult the Lombards and their white gaiters.  You Lombards have
+white legs like so many brood mares.  A Lombard flashes up.  Go to
+the Asfeld, and you will see how Lombard mares can kick.  Your
+brother's bones are lying about there like any sorry nag's.  This is
+too much; swords are drawn; but old Thorisend leaps up.  He will
+punish the first man who strikes.  Guests are sacred.  Let them sit
+down again, and drink their liquor in peace.  And after they have
+drunk, he gives Alboin his dead son's weapons, and lets them go in
+peace, like a noble gentleman.
+
+This grand old King dies in peace.  Aldwin dies likewise, and to them
+succeed their sons, Alboin and Cunimund--the latter probably the
+prince who made the jest about the brood-mares--and they two will
+fight the quarrel out.  Cunimund, says Paul, began the war--of course
+that is his story.  Alboin is growing a great man; he has married a
+daughter of Clotaire, king of the Franks:  and now he takes to his
+alliance the Avars, who have just burst into the Empire, wild people
+who afterwards founded a great kingdom in the Danube lands, and they
+ravage Cunimund's lands.  He will fight the Lombards first,
+nevertheless:  he can settle the Avars after.  He and his, says Paul,
+are slain to a man.  Alboin makes a drinking-cup of his skull,
+carries off his daughter Rosamund ('Rosy-mouth'), and a vast
+multitude of captives and immense wealth.  The Gepidae vanish from
+history; to this day (says Paul) slaves either of the Lombards or the
+Huns (by whom he rather means Avars); and Alboin becomes the hero of
+his time, praised even to Paul's days in sagas, Saxon and Bavarian as
+well as Lombard, for his liberality and his glory.  We shall see now
+how he has his chance at the Nibelungen hoard.
+
+He has heard enough (as all Teutons have) of Italy, its beauty, and
+its weakness.  He has sent five thousand chosen warriors to Narses,
+to help him against Totila and the Ostrogoths; and they have told him
+of the fair land and large, with its vineyards, olive-groves, and
+orchards, waste by war and pestilence, and crying out for human
+beings to come and till it once more.
+
+There is no force left in Italy now, which can oppose him.  Hardly
+any left in the Roman world.  The plague is come; to add its horrors
+to all the other horrors of the time--the true old plague, as far as
+I can ascertain; bred, men say, from the Serbonian bog; the plague
+which visited Athens in the time of Socrates, and England in the
+seventeenth century:  and after the plague a famine; woe on woe,
+through all the dark days of Justinian the demon-emperor.  The
+Ostrogoths, as you know, were extinct as a nation.  The two deluges
+of Franks and Allmen, which, under the two brothers Buccelin and
+Lothaire, all on foot (for the French, as now, were no horsemen), had
+rolled into Italy during the Gothic war, had been swallowed up, as
+all things were, in the fatal gulf of Italy.  Lothaire and his army,
+returning laden with plunder, had rotted away like sheep by Lake
+Benacus (Garda now) of drink, and of the plague.  Buccelin,
+entrenched among his plunder-waggons by the Volturno stream in the
+far south, had waited in vain for that dead brother and his dead
+host, till Narses came on him, with his army of trained Herules and
+Goths; the Francisc axe and barbed pike had proved useless before the
+arrows and the cavalry of the Romans; and no more than five Allmen,
+says one, remained of all that mighty host.  Awful to think of:
+75,000 men, they say, in one column, 100,000 in the other:  and like
+water they flowed over the land; and like water they sank into the
+ground, and left no trace.
+
+And now Narses, established as exarch of Ravenna, a sort of satrap,
+like those of the Persian Emperors, and representing the Emperor of
+Constantinople, was rewarded for all his conquests and labours by
+disgrace.  Eunuch-like, he loved money, they said; and eunuch-like,
+he was harsh and cruel.  The Empress Sophia, listening too readily to
+court-slanders, bade him 'leave to men the use of arms, and come back
+to the palace, to spin among the maids.' --'Tell her,' said the
+terrible old imp, 'I will spin her such a thread as she shall not
+unravel.'
+
+He went, superseded by Longinus; but not to Constantinople.  From
+Naples he sent (so says Paul the Deacon) to Alboin, and bade him come
+and try his fortune as king of Italy.  He sent, too, (so says old
+Paul) presents to tempt the simple Lombard men--such presents as
+children would like--all fruits which grew in Italian orchards.
+Though the gold was gone, those were still left.  Great babies they
+were, these Teutons, as I told you at the first; and Narses knew it
+well, and had used them for his ends for many a year.
+
+Then were terrible signs seen in Italy by night; fiery armies
+fighting in the sky, and streams of blood aloft, foreshadowing the
+blood which should be shed.
+
+Sent for or not, King Alboin came; and with him all his army, and a
+mighty multitude, women, and children, and slaves; Bavarians,
+Gepidae, Bulgars, Sarmatae, Pannonians, Sueves, and Noricans; whose
+names (says Paul) remain unto this day in the names of the villages
+where they settled.  With Alboin, too, came Saxons, twenty thousand
+of them at the least, with wife and child.  And Sigebert king of the
+Franks put Suevic settlers into the lands which the Saxons had left.
+
+Alboin gave up his own Hungarian land to his friends the Avars, on
+the condition that he should have them back if he had to return.  But
+return he never did, he nor his Lombard host.  This is the end.  The
+last invasion of Italy.  The sowing, once for all, of an Italian
+people.  Fresh nations were still pressing down to the rear of the
+Alps, waiting for their turn to enter the Fairy Land--not knowing,
+perhaps, that nothing was left therein, but ashes and blood: --but
+their chance was over now:  a people were going into Italy who could
+hold what they got.
+
+On Easter Tuesday, in the year of grace 568, they came, seemingly by
+the old road; the path of Alaric and Dietrich and the rest; the pass
+from Carniola, through which the rail runs now from Laybach to
+Trieste.  It must have been white, in those days, with the bones of
+nigh 200 years.  And they found bisons, aurochsen, in the mountains,
+Paul says, and is not surprised thereat, because there are plenty of
+them in Hungary near by.  An old man told him he had seen a skin in
+which fifteen men might lie side by side.  None, you must know, are
+left now, save a very few in the Lithuanian forests.  Paul goes out
+of his way to note this fact, and so shall I.
+
+Alboin left a strong guard in Friuli, and Paul's ancestor among them,
+under Gisulf his nephew, and Marphrais or master of the horse, who
+now became duke of Friuli and warden of the marches, bound to prevent
+the Avars following them into their new abode.  Then the human deluge
+spread itself slowly over the Lombard plains.  None fought with them,
+and none gainsaid; for all the land was waste.  The plague of three
+years before, and the famine which followed it had, says Paul,
+reduced the world into primaeval silence.  The villages had no
+inhabitants but dogs; the sheep were pasturing without a shepherd;
+the wild birds swarmed unhurt about the fields.  The corn was
+springing self-sown under the April sun, the vines sprouting
+unpruned, the lucerne fields unmown, when the great Lombard people
+flowed into that waste land, and gave to it their own undying name.
+
+The scanty population, worn out with misery, fled to rocks and
+islands in the lakes, and to the seaport towns; but they seem to have
+found the Lombards merciful masters, and bowed their necks meekly to
+the inevitable yoke.  The towns alone seem to have offered
+resistance.  Pavia Alboin besieged three years, and could not take.
+He swore some wild oath of utter destruction to all within, and would
+have kept it.  At last they capitulated.  As Alboin rode in at St.
+John's gate, his horse slipped up; and could not rise, though the
+grooms beat him with their lance-butts.  A ghostly fear came on the
+Lombards.  'Remember, lord king, thy cruel oath, and cancel it; for
+there are Christian folk in the city.'  Alboin cancelled his oath,
+and the horse rose at once.  So Alboin spared the people of Pavia,
+and entered the palace of old Dietrich the Ostrogoth, as king of
+Italy, as far as the gates of Rome and Ravenna.
+
+And what was his end?  Such an end as he deserved; earned and worked
+out for himself.  A great warrior, he had destroyed many nations, and
+won a fair land.  A just and wise governor, he had settled North
+Italy on some rough feudal system, without bloodshed or cruelty.  A
+passionate savage, he died as savages deserve to die.  You recollect
+Rosamund his Gepid bride?  In some mad drinking-bout (perhaps
+cherishing still his old hatred of her family) he sent her her
+father's skull full of wine, and bade her drink before all.  She
+drank, and had her revenge.
+
+The story has become world-famous from its horror:  but I suppose I
+must tell it you in its place.--How she went to Helmichis the shield-
+bearer, and he bade her get Peredeo the Kemper-man to do the deed:
+and how Peredeo intrigued with one of her bower-maidens, and how
+Rosamund did a deed of darkness, and deceived Peredeo; and then said
+to him, I am thy mistress; thou must slay thy master, or thy master
+thee.  And how he, like Gyges in old Herodotus's tale, preferred to
+survive; and how Rosamund bound the king's sword to his bedstead as
+he slept his mid-day sleep, and Peredeo did the deed; and how Alboin
+leapt up, and fought with his footstool, but in vain.  And how, after
+he was dead, Rosamund became Helmichis' leman, as she had been
+Peredeo's, and fled with him to Ravenna, with all the treasure and
+Alpswintha, Alboin's daughter by the Frankish wife; and how Longinus
+the exarch persuaded her to poison Helmichis, and marry him; and how
+she gave Helmichis the poisoned cup as he came out of the bath, and
+he saw by the light of her wicked eyes that it was poison, and made
+her drink the rest; and so they both fell dead.  And then how Peredeo
+and the treasure were sent to the Emperor at Constantinople; and how
+Peredeo slew a great lion in the theatre; and how Tiberius, when he
+saw that he was so mighty a man of his hands, bade put his eyes out;
+and how he hid two knives in his sleeves, and slew with them two
+great chamberlains of the Emperor; and so died, like Samson, says old
+Paul, having got good weregeld for the loss of his eyes--a man for
+either eye.
+
+And old Narses died at Rome, at a great age; and they wrapt him in
+lead, and sent him to Byzant with all his wealth.  But some say that
+while he was still alive, he hid his wealth in a great cistern, and
+slew all who knew of it save one old man, and swore him never to
+reveal the place.  But after Narses' death that old man went to
+Constantinople to Tiberius the Caesar, and told him how he could not
+die with that secret on his mind; and so Tiberius got all the money,
+so much that it took many days to carry away, and gave it all to the
+poor, as was his wont.
+
+A myth--a fable:  but significant, as one more attempt to answer the
+question of all questions in a Teuton's mind--What had become of the
+Nibelungen hoard?  What had become of all the wealth of Rome?
+
+
+
+LECTURE VIII--THE CLERGY AND THE HEATHEN
+
+
+
+I asked in my first lecture, 'What would become of the forest
+children, unless some kind saint or hermit took pity on them?'
+
+I used the words saint and hermit with a special purpose.  It was by
+the influence, actual or imaginary, of such, that the Teutons, after
+the destruction of the Roman empire, were saved from becoming hordes
+of savages, destroying each other by continual warfare.
+
+What our race owes, for good and for evil, to the Roman clergy, I
+shall now try to set before you.
+
+To mete out to them their due share of praise and blame is, I
+confess, a very difficult task.  It can only be fulfilled by putting
+oneself, as far as possible, in their place, and making human
+allowance for the circumstances, utterly novel and unexpected, in
+which they found themselves during the Teutonic invasions.  Thus,
+perhaps, we may find it true of some of them, as of others, that
+'Wisdom is justified of all her children.'
+
+That is a hard saying for human nature.  Justified of her children
+she may be, after we have settled which are to be her children and
+which not:  but of all her children?  That is a hard saying.  And yet
+was not every man from the beginning of the world, who tried with his
+whole soul to be right, and to do good, a child of wisdom, of whom
+she at least will be justified, whether he is justified or not?  He
+may have had his ignorances, follies, weaknesses, possibly crimes:
+but he served the purpose of his mighty mother.  He did, even by his
+follies, just what she wanted done; and she is justified of all her
+children.
+
+This may sound like optimism:  but it also sounds like truth to any
+one who has fairly studied that fantastic page of history, the
+contrast between the old monks and our own heathen forefathers.  The
+more one studies the facts, the less one is inclined to ask, 'Why was
+it not done better?'--the more inclined to ask, 'Could it have been
+done better?'  Were not the celibate clergy, from the fifth to the
+eighth centuries, exceptional agents fitted for an exceptional time,
+and set to do a work which in the then state of the European races,
+none else could have done?  At least, so one suspects, after
+experience of their chronicles and legends, sufficient to make one
+thoroughly detest the evil which was in their system:  but sufficient
+also to make one thoroughly love many of the men themselves.
+
+A few desultory sketches, some carefully historical, the rest as
+carefully compiled from common facts, may serve best to illustrate my
+meaning.
+
+The monk and clergyman, whether celibate or not, worked on the
+heathen generally in one of three capacities:  As tribune of the
+people; as hermit or solitary prophet; as colonizer; and in all three
+worked as well as frail human beings are wont to do, in this most
+piecemeal world.
+
+Let us look first at the Hermits.  All know what an important part
+they play in old romances and ballads.  All are not aware that they
+played as important a part in actual history.  Scattered through all
+wildernesses from the cliffs of the Hebrides to the Sclavonian
+marches, they put forth a power, uniformly, it must be said, for
+good.
+
+Every one knows how they appear in the old romances.--How some Sir
+Bertrand or other, wearied with the burden of his sins, stumbles on
+one of these Einsiedler, 'settlers alone,' and talks with him; and
+goes on a wiser and a better man.  How he crawls, perhaps, out of
+some wild scuffle, 'all-to bebled,' and reeling to his saddlebow; and
+'ever he went through a waste land, and rocks rough and strait, so
+that it him seemed he must surely starve; and anon he heard a little
+bell, whereat he marvelled; and betwixt the water and the wood he was
+aware of a chapel, and an hermitage; and there a holy man said mass,
+for he was a priest, and a great leech, and cunning withal.  And Sir
+Bertrand went in to him and told him all his case--how he fought Sir
+Marculf for love of the fair Ellinore, and how the king bade part
+them, and how Marculf did him open shame at the wineboard, and how he
+went about to have slain him privily, but could not; and then how he
+went and wasted Marculf's lands, house with byre, kine with corn,
+till a strong woman smote him over the head with a quern-stone, and
+all-to broke his brain-pan;' and so forth--the usual story of mad
+passion, drink, pride, revenge.
+
+'And there the holy man a-read him right godly doctrine, and shrived
+him, and gave him an oath upon the blessed Gospels, that fight he
+should not, save in his liege lord's quarrel, for a year and a day.
+And there he abode till he was well healed, he and his horse.'
+
+Must not that wild fighting Bertrand have gone away from that place a
+wiser and a better man?  Is it a matter to be regretted, or
+otherwise, that such men as the hermit were to be found in that
+forest, to mend Bertrand's head and his morals, at the same time?  Is
+it a matter to be regretted, or otherwise, that after twenty or
+thirty years more of fighting and quarrelling and drinking, this same
+Sir Bertrand--finding that on the whole the lust of the flesh, the
+lust of the eye, and the pride of life, were poor paymasters, and
+having very sufficient proof, in the ends of many a friend and foe,
+that the wages of sin are death--'fell to religion likewise, and was
+a hermit in that same place, after the holy man was dead; and was
+made priest of that same chapel; and died in honour, having succoured
+many good knights, and wayfaring men'?
+
+One knows very well that it would not be right now; that it is not
+needed now.  It is childish to repeat that, when the question is, was
+it right then--or, at least, as right as was possible then?  Was it
+needed then--or, at least, the nearest thing to that which was
+needed?
+
+If it was, why should not wisdom be justified of all her children?
+
+One hopes that she was; for certainly, if any men ever needed to be
+in the right, lest they should be of all men most miserable, it was
+these same old hermits.  Praying and preaching continually, they
+lived on food which dogs would not eat, in dens in which dogs ought
+not to live.  They had their reasons.  Possibly they knew their own
+business best.  Possibly also they knew their neighbour's business
+somewhat; they knew that such generations as they lived in could not
+be taught, save by some extravagant example of this kind, some
+caricature, as it were, of the doctrines which were to be enforced.
+Nothing less startling, perhaps, could have touched the dull hearts,
+have convinced the dull brains, of fierce, ignorant, and unreasoning
+men.
+
+Ferocity, lawlessness, rapine, cruelty, and--when they were glutted
+and debauched by the spoils of the Roman empire--sensuality, were the
+evils which were making Europe uninhabitable for decent folk, and
+history--as Milton called it--a mere battle of kites and crows.  What
+less than the example of the hermit--especially when that hermit was
+a delicate and high-born woman--could have taught men the absolute
+superiority of soul to body, of spiritual to physical force, of
+spiritual to physical pleasure, and have said to them, not in vain
+words, but solid acts--'All that you follow is not the way of life.
+The very opposite to it is the way of life.  The wages of sin are
+death; and you will find them so,--in this life the victims of your
+own passions, and of the foes whom your crimes arouse, and in life to
+come of hell for ever.  But I tell you I have no mind to go to hell.
+I have a mind to go to heaven; and I know my mind right well.  If the
+world is to be such as this, and the rulers thereof such as you, I
+will flee from you.  I will not enter into the congregation of
+sinners, neither will I cast in my lot with the bloodthirsty.  I will
+be alone with God and His universe.  I will go to the mountain cave
+or to the ocean cliff, and there, while the salt wind whistles
+through my hair, I will be stronger than you, safer than you, richer
+than you, happier than you.  Richer than you, for I shall have for my
+companion the beatific vision of God, and of all things and beings
+God-like, fair, noble, just, and merciful.  Stronger than you,
+because virtue will give me a power over the hearts of men such as
+your force cannot give you; and you will have to come to my lonely
+cell, and ask me to advise you, and teach you, and help you against
+the consequences of your own sins.  Safer than you, because God in
+whom I trust will protect me:  and if not, I have still the
+everlasting life of heaven, which this world cannot give or take
+away.  So go your ways, fight and devour one another, the victims of
+your own lusts.  I am minded to be a good man; and to be that, I will
+give up--as you have made all other methods impossible for me--all
+which seems to make life worth having'?  Oh! instead of finding fault
+with such men; instead of, with vulturine beak, picking out the
+elements of Manichaeism, of conceit, of discontent, of what not human
+frailty and ignorance, which may have been in them, let us honour the
+enormous moral force which enabled them so to bear witness that not
+the mortal animal, but the immortal spirit, is the Man; and that when
+all which outward circumstance can give is cast away, the Man still
+lives for ever, by God, and in God.
+
+And they did teach that lesson.  They were good, while other men were
+bad; and men saw the beauty of goodness, and felt the strength of it,
+and worshipped it in blind savage admiration.  Read Roswede's Vitae
+Patrum Eremiticorum; read the legends of the hermits of the German
+forests; read Colgan's Lives of the Irish Saints; and see whether,
+amid all fantastic, incredible, sometimes immoral myths, the goodness
+of life of some one or other is not the historic nucleus, round which
+the myths, and the worship of the saint, have crystallized and
+developed.
+
+Take, for instance, the exquisite hymn of St. Bridget, which Colgan
+attributes to the sixth century:  though it is probably much later;
+that has nothing to do with the argument:-
+
+
+'Bridget, the victorious, she loved not the world;
+She sat on it as a gull sits on the ocean;
+She slept the sleep of a captive mother,
+Mourning after her absent child.
+
+She suffered not much from evil tongues;
+She held the blessed faith of the Trinity;
+Bridget, the mother of my Lord of Heaven,
+The best among the sons of the Lord.
+
+She was not querulous, nor malevolent;
+She loved not the fierce wrangling of women;
+She was not a backbiting serpent, or a liar;
+She sold not the Son of God for that which passes away.
+
+She was not greedy of the goods of this life;
+She gave away without gall, without slackness;
+She was not rough to wayfaring men;
+She handled gently the wretched lepers.
+
+She built her a town in the plains (of Kildare);
+And dead, she is the patroness of many peoples.'
+
+* * *
+
+
+I might comment much on this quotation.  I might point out how St.
+Bridget is called the mother of the Lord, and by others, the Mary of
+the Irish, the 'Automata coeli regina,' and seems to have been
+considered at times as an avatar or incarnation of the blessed
+Virgin.  I might more than hint how that appellation, as well as the
+calling of Christ 'the best of the sons of the Lord,' in an orthodox
+Catholic hymn, seems to point to the remnants of an older creed,
+possibly Buddhist, the transition whence towards Catholic
+Christianity was slow and imperfect.  I might make merry over the
+fact that there are many Bridgets, some say eleven; even as there are
+three or four St. Patricks; and raise learned doubts as to whether
+such persons ever existed, after that Straussian method of pseudo-
+criticism which cometh not from above, from the Spirit of God, nor
+yet indeed from below, from the sound region of fact, but from
+within, out of the naughtiness of the heart, defiling a man.  I might
+weaken, too, the effect of the hymn by going on with the rest of it,
+and making you smile at its childish miracles and portents; but I
+should only do a foolish thing, by turning your minds away from the
+broad fact that St. Bridget, or various persons who got, in the lapse
+of time, massed together under the name of St. Bridget, were
+eminently good women.
+
+It matters little whether these legends are historically correct.
+Their value lies in the moral of them.  And as for their real
+historical correctness, the Straussian argument that no such persons
+existed, because lies are told of them, is, I hold, most irrational.
+The falsehood would not have been invented unless it had started in a
+truth.  The high moral character ascribed to them would never have
+been dreamed of by persons who had not seen living instances of that
+character.  Man's imagination does not create; it only reproduces and
+recombines its own experience.  It does so in dreams.  It does so, as
+far as the moral character of the saint is concerned, in the legend;
+and if there had not been persons like St. Bridget in Ireland, the
+wild Irish could never have imagined them.
+
+Therefore it matters little to a wise man, standing on the top of
+Croagh Patrick, the grandest mountain perhaps, with the grandest
+outlook, in these British isles, as he looks on the wild Irish there
+on pattern days, up among the Atlantic clouds, crawling on bare and
+bleeding knees round St. Patrick's cell,--it matters little, I say,
+to the wise man, whether St. Patrick himself owned the ancient image
+which is worshipped on that mountain peak, or the ancient bell which
+till late years hung in the sanctuary,--such a strange oblong bell as
+the Irish saints carried with them to keep off the demons--the magic
+bells which appear (as far as I am aware) in the legends of no
+country till you get to Tartary and the Buddhists;--such a bell as
+came (or did not come) down from heaven to St. Senan; such a bell as
+St. Fursey sent flying through the air to greet St. Cuanady at his
+devotions when he could not come himself; such a bell as another
+saint, wandering in the woods, rang till a stag came out of the
+covert, and carried his burden for him on his horns.  It matters as
+little to the wise man whether that bell belonged to St. Patrick, as
+whether all these child's dreams are dreams.  It matters little to
+him, too, whether St. Patrick did, or did not stand on that mountain
+peak, 'in the spirit and power of Elias' (after whom it was long
+named), fasting, like Elias, forty days and forty nights, wrestling
+with the demons of the storm, and the snakes of the fen, and the
+Peishta-more (the monstrous Python of the lakes), which assembled at
+the magic ringing of his bell, till he conquered not by the brute
+force of a Hercules and Theseus, and the monster-quellers of old
+Greece, but by the spiritual force of which (so the text was then
+applied) it is written, 'This kind cometh not out but by prayer and
+fasting,' till he smote the evil things with 'the golden rod of
+Jesus,' and they rolled over the cliff, in hideous rout, and perished
+in the Atlantic far below.  But it matters much to a wise man that
+under all these symbols (not childish at all, but most grand, to the
+man who knows the grand place of which they are told), there is set
+forth the victory of a good and beneficent man over evil, whether of
+matter or of spirit.  It matters much to him that that cell, that
+bell, that image are tokens that if not St. Patrick, some one else,
+at least, did live and worship on that mountain top, in remote
+primaeval times, in a place in which we would not, perhaps could not,
+endure life a week.  It matters much to him that the man who so dwelt
+there, gained such a power over the minds of the heathen round him,
+that five millions of their Christian descendants worship him, and
+God on account of him, at this day.
+
+St. Ita, again.  It matters little that she did not--because she
+could not--perform the miracles imputed to her.  It matters little
+whether she had or not--as I do not believe her to have had--a
+regularly organized convent of nuns in Ireland during the sixth
+century.  It matters little if the story which follows is a mere
+invention of the nuns in some after-century, in order to make a good
+title for the lands which they held--a trick but too common in those
+days.  But it matters much that she should have been such a person,
+that such a story as this, when told of her, should have gained
+belief:- How the tribes of Hy-Connell, hearing of her great holiness,
+came to her with their chiefs, and offered her all the land about her
+cell.  But she, not wishing to be entangled with earthly cares,
+accepted but four acres round her cell, for a garden of herbs for her
+and her nuns.  And the simple wild Irish were sad and angry, and
+said, 'If thou wilt not take it alive, thou shalt take it when thou
+art dead.  So they chose her then and there for their patroness, and
+she blessed them with many blessings, which are fulfilled unto this
+day; and when she migrated to the Lord they gave her all the land,
+and her nuns hold it to this day, the land of Hy-Connell on the east
+Shannon bank, at the roots of Luachra mountain.'
+
+What a picture!  One hopes that it may be true, for the sake of its
+beauty and its pathos.  The poor, savage, half-naked, and, I fear, on
+the authority of St. Jerome and others, now and then cannibal Celts,
+with their saffron scarfs, and skenes, and darts, and glibs of long
+hair hanging over their hypo-gorillaceous visages, coming to the
+prophet maiden, and asking her to take their land, for they could
+make no decent use of it themselves; and look after them, body and
+soul, for they could not look after themselves; and pray for them to
+her God, for they did not know how to pray to Him themselves.  If any
+man shall regret that such an event happened to any savages on this
+earth, I am, I confess, sorry for him.
+
+St. Severinus, again, whom I have mentioned to you more than once:-
+none of us can believe that he made a dead corpse (Silvinus the
+priest, by name) sit up and talk with him on its road to burial.
+None of us need believe that he stopped the plague at Vienna by his
+prayers.  None of us need attribute to anything but his sagacity the
+Divine revelations whereby he predicted the destruction of a town for
+its wickedness, and escaped thence, like Lot, alone; or by which he
+discovered, during the famine of Vienna, that a certain rich widow
+had much corn hidden in her cellars:  but there are facts enough,
+credible and undoubted, concerning St. Severinus, the apostle of
+Austria, to make us trust that in him, too, wisdom was justified of
+all her children.
+
+You may remark, among the few words which have been as yet said of
+St. Severinus, a destruction, a plague, and a famine.  Those words
+are a fair sample of St. Severinus's times, and of the circumstances
+into which he voluntarily threw himself.  About the middle of the
+fifth century there appears in the dying Roman province of Noricum
+(Austria we now call it) a strange gentleman, eloquent and learned
+beyond all, and with the strangest power of melting and ruling the
+hearts of men.  Who he is he will not tell, save that his name is
+Severinus, a right noble name without doubt.  Gradually it oozes out
+that he has been in the far East, through long travels and strange
+dangers, through many cities and many lands; but he will tell
+nothing.  He is the servant of God, come hither to try to be of use.
+He certainly could have come for no other reason, unless to buy
+slaves; for Austria was at that time the very highway of the nations,
+the centre of the human Mahlstrom, in which Huns, Gepiden, Allmannen,
+Rugen, and a dozen wild tribes more, wrestled up and down round the
+starving and beleaguered Roman towns of that once fertile and happy
+province.  A man who went there for his own pleasure, or even
+devotion, would have been as wise as one who had built himself last
+summer a villa on the Rappahannock, or retired for private meditation
+to the orchard of Hougoumont during the battle of Waterloo.
+
+Nevertheless, there Severinus stayed till men began to appreciate
+him; and called him, and not unjustly, Saint.  Why not?  He preached,
+he taught, he succoured, he advised, he fed, he governed; he turned
+aside the raids of the wild German kings; he gained a divine power
+over their hearts; he taught them something of God and of Christ,
+something of justice and mercy; something of peace and unity among
+themselves; till the fame ran through all the Alps, and far away into
+the Hungarian marches, that there was a prophet of God arisen in the
+land; and before the unarmed man, fasting and praying in his solitary
+cell on the mountain above Vienna, ten thousand knights and champions
+trembled, who never had trembled at the sight of armed hosts.
+
+Who would deny that man the name of saint?  And who, if by that
+sagacity which comes from the combination of intellect and virtue, he
+sometimes seemed miraculously to foretell coming events, would deny
+him the name of prophet also?
+
+If St. Severinus be the type of the monk as prophet, St. Columba may
+stand as the type of the missionary monk; the good man strengthened
+by lonely meditation; but using that strength not for selfish
+fanaticism, but for the good of men; going forth unwillingly out of
+his beloved solitude, that he may save souls.  Round him, too,
+cluster the usual myths.  He drives away with the sign of the cross a
+monster which attacks him at a ford.  He expels from a fountain the
+devils who smote with palsy and madness all who bathed therein.  He
+sees by a prophetic spirit, he sitting in his cell in Ireland, a
+great Italian town destroyed by a volcano.  His friends behold a
+column of light rising from his head as he celebrates mass.  Yes; but
+they also tell of him, 'that he was angelical in look, brilliant in
+speech, holy in work, clear in intellect, great in council.'  That he
+'never passed an hour without prayer, or a holy deed, or reading of
+the Scriptures (for these old monks had Bibles, and knew them by
+heart too, in spite of all that has been written to the contrary),
+that he was of so excellent a humility and charity, bathing his
+disciples' feet when they came home from labour, and carrying corn
+from the mill on his own back, that he fulfilled the precept of his
+Master, 'He that will be the greatest among you, let him be as your
+servant.'
+
+They also tell of him (and this is fact and history) how he left his
+monastery of Derm Each, 'the field of oaks,' which we call Derry, and
+went away at the risk of his life to preach to the wild Picts of
+Galloway, and founded the great monastery of Iona, and that
+succession of abbots from whom Christianity spread over the south of
+Scotland and north of England, under his great successor Aidan.
+
+Aidan has his myths likewise.  They tell of him how he stilled the
+sea-waves with holy oil; how he turned back on Penda and his Saxons
+the flames with which the heathen king was trying to burn down
+Bamborough walls.  But they tell, too (and Bede had heard it from
+those who had known Aidan in the flesh) of 'his love of peace and
+charity, his purity and humility, his mind superior to avarice or
+pride, his authority, becoming a minister of Christ, in reproving the
+haughty and powerful, and his tenderness in relieving the afflicted,
+and defending the poor.'  Who, save one who rejoiceth in evil,
+instead of rejoicing in the truth, will care to fix his eyes for a
+moment upon the fairy tales which surround such a story, as long as
+there shines out from among them clear and pure, in spite of all
+doctrinal errors, the grace of God, the likeness of Jesus Christ our
+Lord?
+
+Let us look next at the priest as Tribune of the people, supported
+usually by the invisible, but most potent presence of the saint,
+whose relics he kept.  One may see that side of his power in
+Raphael's immortal design of Attila's meeting with the Pope at the
+gates of Rome, and recoiling as he sees St. Peter and St. Paul
+floating terrible and threatening above the Holy City.  Is it a myth,
+a falsehood?  Not altogether.  Such a man as Attila probably would
+have seen them, with his strong savage imagination, as incapable as
+that of a child from distinguishing between dreams and facts, between
+the subjective and the objective world.  And it was on the whole well
+for him and for mankind, that he should think that he saw them, and
+tremble before the spiritual and the invisible; confessing a higher
+law than that of his own ambition and self-will; a higher power than
+that of his brute Tartar hordes.
+
+Raphael's design is but a famous instance of an influence which
+wrought through the length and breadth of the down-trodden and dying
+Roman Empire, through the four fearful centuries which followed the
+battle of Adrianople.  The wild licence, the boyish audacity, of the
+invading Teutons was never really checked, save by the priest and the
+monk who worshipped over the bones of some old saint or martyr, whose
+name the Teutons had never heard.
+
+Then, as the wild King, Earl, or Comes, with his wild reiters at his
+heels, galloped through the land, fighting indiscriminately his Roman
+enemies, and his Teutonic rivals--harrying, slaughtering, burning by
+field and wild--he was aware at last of something which made him
+pause.  Some little walled town, built on the ruins of a great Roman
+city, with its Byzantine minster towering over the thatched roofs,
+sheltering them as the oak shelters the last night's fungus at its
+base.  More than once in the last century or two, has that same town
+been sacked.  More than once has the surviving priest crawled out of
+his hiding-place when the sound of war was past, called the surviving
+poor around him, dug the dead out of the burning ruins for Christian
+burial, built up a few sheds, fed a few widows and orphans, organized
+some form of orderly life out of the chaos of blood and ashes, in the
+name of God and St. Quemdeusvult whose bones he guards; and so he has
+established a temporary theocracy, and become a sort of tribune of
+the people, magistrate and father--the only one they have.  And now
+he will try the might of St. Quemdeusvult against the wild king, and
+see if he can save the town from being sacked once more.  So out he
+comes--a bishop perhaps, with priests, monks, crucifixes, banners,
+litanies.  The wild king must come no further.  That land belongs to
+no mortal man, but to St. Quemdeusvult, martyred here by the heathen
+five hundred years ago.  Some old Kaiser of Rome, or it may be some
+former Gothic king, gave that place to the saint for ever, and the
+saint will avenge his rights.  He is very merciful to those who duly
+honour him:  but very terrible in his wrath if he be aroused.  Has
+not the king heard how the Count of such a place, only forty years
+before, would have carried off a maiden from St. Quemdeusvult's town;
+and when the bishop withstood him, he answered that he cared no more
+for the relics of the saint than for the relics of a dead ass, and so
+took the maiden and went?  But within a year and a day, he fell down
+dead in his drink, and when they came to lay out the corpse, behold
+the devils had carried it away, and put a dead ass in its place.
+
+All which the bishop would fully believe.  Why not?  He had no
+physical science to tell him that it was impossible.  Morally, it was
+in his eyes just, and therefore probable; while as for testimony, men
+were content with very little in those days, simply because they
+could get very little.  News progressed slowly in countries desolate
+and roadless, and grew as it passed from mouth to mouth, as it did in
+the Highlands a century ago, as it did but lately in the Indian
+Mutiny; till after a fact had taken ten years in crossing a few
+mountains and forests, it had assumed proportions utterly fantastic
+and gigantic.
+
+So the wild king and his wild knights pause.  They can face flesh and
+blood:  but who can face the quite infinite terrors of an unseen
+world?  They are men of blood too, men of evil lives; and conscience
+makes them cowards.  They begin to think that they have gone too far.
+Could they see the saint, and make it up with him somewhat?
+
+No.  The saint they cannot see.  To open his shrine would be to
+commit the sin of Uzzah.  Palsy and blindness would be the least that
+would follow.  But the dome under which he lies all men may see; and
+perhaps the saint may listen, if they speak him fair.
+
+They feel more and more uncomfortable.  This saint, in heaven at
+God's right hand, and yet there in the dom-church--is clearly a
+mysterious, ubiquitous person, who may take them in the rear very
+unexpectedly.  And his priests, with their book-learning, and their
+sciences, and their strange dresses and chants--who knows what secret
+powers, magical or other, they may not possess?
+
+They bluster at first:  being (as I have said) much of the temper and
+habits, for good and evil, of English navvies.  But they grow more
+and more uneasy, full of childish curiosity, and undefined dread.  So
+into the town they go, on promise (which they will honourably keep,
+being German men) of doing no harm to the plebs, the half Roman
+artisans and burghers who are keeping themselves alive here--the last
+dying remnants of the civilization, and luxury, and cruelty, and
+wickedness, of a great Roman colonial city; and they stare at arts
+and handicrafts new to them; and are hospitably fed by bishops and
+priests; and then they go, trembling and awkward, into the great dom-
+church; and gaze wondering at the frescoes, and the carvings of the
+arcades--marbles from Italy, porphyries from Egypt, all patched
+together out of the ruins of Roman baths, and temples, and theatres;
+and at last they arrive at the saint's shrine itself--some marble
+sarcophagus, most probably covered with vine and ivy leaves, with
+nymphs and satyrs, long since consecrated with holy water to a new
+and better use.  Inside that lies the saint, asleep, yet ever awake.
+So they had best consider in whose presence they are, and fear God
+and St. Quemdeusvult, and cast away the seven deadly sins wherewith
+they are defiled; for the saint is a righteous man, and died for
+righteousness' sake; and those who rob the orphan and the widow, and
+put the fatherless to death, them he cannot abide; and them he will
+watch like an eagle of the sky, and track like a wolf of the wood,
+fill he punishes them with a great destruction.  In short, the bishop
+preaches to the king and his men a right noble and valiant sermon,
+calling things by their true names without fear or favour, and
+assuming, on the mere strength of being in the right, a tone of calm
+superiority which makes the strong armed men blush and tremble before
+the weak and helpless one.
+
+Yes.  Spirit is stronger than flesh.  'Meekly bend thy neck,
+Sicamber!' said St. Remigius to the great conquering King Clovis,
+when he stept into the baptismal font--(not 'Most Gracious Majesty,'
+or 'Illustrious Caesar,' or 'by the grace of God Lord of the Franks,'
+but Sicamber, as a missionary might now say Maori, or Caffre,--and
+yet St. Remigius's life was in Clovis's hand then and always),--'Burn
+what thou hast adored, and adore what thou hast burned!'  And the
+terrible Clovis trembled and obeyed.
+
+So does the wild king at the shrine of St. Quemdeusvult.  He takes
+his bracelet, or his jewel, and offers it civilly enough.  Will the
+bishop be so good as to inform the great Earl St. Quemdeusvult, that
+he was not aware of his rights, or even of his name; that perhaps he
+will deign to accept this jewel, which he took off the neck of a
+Roman General--that--that on the whole he is willing to make the
+amende honorable, as far as is consistent with the feelings of a
+nobleman; and trusts that the saint, being a nobleman too, will be
+satisfied therewith.
+
+After which, probably, it will appear to the wild king that this
+bishop is the very man that he wants, the very opposite to himself
+and his wild riders; a man pure, peaceable, just, and brave;
+possessed, too, of boundless learning; who can read, write, cipher,
+and cast nativities; who has a whole room full of books and
+parchments, and a map of the whole world; who can talk Latin, and
+perhaps Greek, as well as one of those accursed man-eating Grendels,
+a Roman lawyer, or a logothete from Ravenna; possessed, too, of
+boundless supernatural power;--Would the bishop be so good as to help
+him in his dispute with the Count Boso, about their respective
+marches in such and such a forest?  If the bishop could only settle
+that without more fighting, of course he should have his reward.  He
+would confirm to the saint and his burg all the rights granted by
+Constantine the Kaiser; and give him moreover all the meadow land in
+such and such a place, with the mills and fisheries, on service of a
+dish of trout from the bishop and his successors, whenever he came
+that way:  for the trout there were exceeding good, that he knew.
+And so a bargain would be struck, and one of those curious
+compromises between the spiritual and temporal authorities take root,
+of which one may read at length in the pages of M. Guizot, or Sir
+James Stephen.
+
+And after a few years, most probably, the king would express a wish
+to be baptized, at the instance of his queen who had been won over by
+the bishop, and had gone down into the font some years before; and he
+would bid his riders be baptized also; and they would obey, seeing
+that it could do them no harm, and might do them some good; and they
+would agree to live more or less according to the laws of God and
+common humanity; and so one more Christian state would be formed; one
+more living stone (as it was phrased in those days) built into the
+great temple of God which was called Christendom.
+
+So the work was done.  Can we devise any better method of doing it?
+If not, let us be content that it was done somehow, and believe that
+wisdom is justified of all her children.
+
+We may object to the fact, that the dom-church and its organization
+grew up (as was the case in the vast majority of instances) round the
+body of a saint or martyr; we may smile at the notion of an invisible
+owner and protector of the soil:  but we must not overlook the broad
+fact, that without that prestige the barbarians would never have been
+awed into humanity; without that prestige the place would have been
+swept off the face of the earth, till not one stone stood on another:
+and he who does not see what a disaster for humanity that would have
+been, must be ignorant that the civilization of Europe is the child
+of the towns; and also that our Teutonic forefathers were by
+profession destroyers of towns, and settlers apart from each other on
+country freeholds.  Lonely barbarism would have been the fate of
+Europe, but for the monk who guarded the relics of the saint within
+the walled burg.
+
+This good work of the Church, in the preservation and even
+resuscitation of the municipal institutions of the towns, has been
+discust so well and fully by M. Guizot, M. Sismondi, and Sir James
+Stephen, that I shall say no more about it, save to recommend you to
+read what they have written.  I go on to point out to you some other
+very important facts, which my ideal sketch exemplifies.
+
+The difference between the Clergy and the Teuton conquerors was more
+than a difference of creed, or of civilization.  It was an actual
+difference of race.  They were Romans, to whom the Teuton was a
+savage, speaking a different tongue, obeying different laws, his
+whole theory of the universe different from the Roman.  And he was,
+moreover, an enemy and a destroyer.  The Teuton was to them as a
+Hindoo is to us, with the terrible exception, that the positions were
+reversed; that the Teuton was not the conquered, but the conqueror.
+It is easy for us to feel humanity and Christian charity toward races
+which we have mastered.  It was not so easy for the Roman priest to
+feel them toward a race which had mastered him.  His repugnance to
+the 'Barbarian' must have been at first intense.  He never would have
+conquered it; he never would have become the willing converter of the
+heathen, had there not been in him the Spirit of God, and firm belief
+in a Catholic Church, to which all men of all races ought alike to
+belong.  This true and glorious idea, the only one which has ever
+been or ever will be able to break down the barriers of race, and the
+animal antipathy which the natural man has to all who are not of his
+own kin:  this idea was the sole possession of the Roman clergy; and
+by it they conquered, because it was true, and came from God.
+
+But this very difference of race exposed the clergy to great
+temptations.  They were the only civilized men left, west of
+Constantinople.  They looked on the Teuton not as a man, but as a
+child; to be ruled; to be petted when he did right, punished when he
+did wrong; and too often cajoled into doing right, and avoiding
+wrong.  Craft became more and more their usual weapon.  There were
+great excuses for them.  Their lives and property were in continual
+danger.  Craft is the natural weapon of the weak against the strong.
+It seemed to them, too often, to be not only natural, but spiritual
+also, and therefore just and right.
+
+Again, the clergy were the only organic remnants of the Roman Empire.
+They claimed their privileges and lands as granted to them by past
+Roman Emperors, under the Roman law.  This fact made it their
+interest, of course, to perpetuate that Roman law, and to introduce
+it as far as they could among their conquerors, to the expulsion of
+the old Teutonic laws; and they succeeded on the whole.  Of that more
+hereafter.  Observe now, that as their rights dated from times which
+to the Teutons were pre-historic, their statements could not be
+checked by conquerors who could not even read.  Thence rose the
+temptation to forge; to forge legends, charters, dotations,
+ecclesiastical history of all kinds--an ugly and world-famous
+instance of which you will hear of hereafter.  To that temptation
+they yielded more and more as the years rolled on, till their
+statements on ecclesiastical history became such as no historian can
+trust, without the most plentiful corroboration.
+
+There were great excuses for them, in this matter, as in others.
+They could not but look on the Teuton as--what in fact and law he
+was--an unjust and intrusive usurper.  They could not but look on
+their Roman congregations, and on themselves, as what in fact and law
+they were, the rightful owners of the soil.  They were but defending
+or recovering their original rights.  Would not the end justify the
+means?
+
+But more.  Out of this singular position grew a doctrine, which looks
+to us irrational now, but was by no means so then.  If the Church
+derived her rights from the extinct Roman Caesars, how could the
+Teuton conquerors interfere with those rights?  If she had owed
+allegiance to Constantine or Theodosius, she certainly owed none to
+Dietrich, Alboin, or Clovis.  She did not hold their lands of them;
+and would pay them, if she could avoid it, neither tax nor toll.  She
+did not recognize the sovereignty of these Teutons as 'ordained by
+God.'
+
+Out of this simple political fact grew up vast consequences.  The
+Teuton king was a heathen or Arian usurper.  He was not a king de
+jure, in the eyes of the clergy, till he was baptized into the
+Church, and then lawfully anointed king by the clergy.  Thus the
+clergy gradually became the makers of kings; and the power of making
+involved a corresponding power of unmaking, if the king rebelled
+against the Church, and so cut himself off from Christendom.  At
+best, he was one of 'the Princes of this world,' from whom the Church
+was free, absolutely in spiritual matters, and in temporal matters,
+also de jure, and therefore de facto as far as she could be made
+free.  To keep the possessions of the Church from being touched by
+profane hands, even that they might contribute to the common needs of
+the nation, became a sacred duty, a fixed idea, for which the clergy
+must struggle, anathematize, forge if need be:  but also--to do them
+justice--die if need be as martyrs.  The nations of this world were
+nothing to them.  The wars of the nations were nothing.  They were
+the people of God, 'who dwelt alone, and were not reckoned among the
+nations;' their possessions were the inheritance of God:  and from
+this idea, growing (as I have shewn) out of a political fact, arose
+the extra-national, and too often anti-national position, which the
+Roman clergy held for many ages, and of which the instinct, at least,
+lingers among them in many countries.  Out of it arose, too, all
+after struggles between the temporal and ecclesiastical powers.
+Becket, fighting to the death against Henry II., was not, as M.
+Thierry thinks, the Anglo-Saxon defying the Norman.  He was the
+representative of the Christian Roman defying the Teuton, on the
+ground of rights which he believed to have existed while the Teuton
+was a heathen in the German forests.  Gradually, as the nations of
+Europe became really nations, within fixed boundaries, and separate
+Christian organizations, these demands of the Church became
+intolerable in reason, because unnecessary in fact.  But had there
+not been in them at the first an instinct of right and justice, they
+would never have become the fixed idea of the clerical mind; the
+violation of them the one inexpiable sin; and the defence of them (as
+may be seen by looking through the Romish Calendar) the most potent
+qualification for saintship.
+
+Yes.  The clergy believed that idea deeply enough to die for it.  St.
+Alphege at Canterbury had been, it is said, one of the first advisers
+of the ignominious payment of the Danegeld:  but there was one thing
+which he would not do.  He would advise the giving up of the money of
+the nation:  but the money of his church he would not give up.  The
+Danes might thrust him into a filthy dungeon:  he would not take the
+children's bread and cast it unto the dogs.  They might drag him out
+into their husting, and threaten him with torture:  but to the
+drunken cry of 'Gold!  Bishop!  Gold!' his only answer would be--Not
+a penny.  He could not rob the poor of Christ.  And when he fell,
+beaten to death with the bones and horns of the slaughtered oxen, he
+died in faith; a martyr to the great idea of that day, that the gold
+of the Church did not belong to the conquerors of this world.
+
+But St. Alphege was an Englishman, and not a Roman.  True in the
+letter:  but not in the spirit.  The priest or monk, by becoming
+such, more or less renounced his nationality.  It was the object of
+the Church to make him renounce it utterly; to make him regard
+himself no longer as Englishman, Frank, Lombard, or Goth:  but as the
+representatives by an hereditary descent, considered all the more
+real because it was spiritual and not carnal, of the Roman Church; to
+prevent his being entangled, whether by marriage or otherwise, in the
+business of this life; out of which would flow nepotism, Simony, and
+Erastian submission to those sovereigns who ought to be the servants,
+not the lords of the Church.  For this end no means were too costly.
+St. Dunstan, in order to expel the married secular priests, and
+replace them by Benedictine monks of the Italian order of Monte
+Casino, convulsed England, drove her into civil war, paralysed her
+monarchs one after the other, and finally left her exhausted and
+imbecile, a prey to the invading Northmen:  but he had at least done
+his best to make the royal House of Cerdic, and the nations which
+obeyed that House, understand that the Church derived its rights not
+from them, but from Rome.
+
+This hereditary sense of superiority on the part of the clergy may
+explain and excuse much of their seeming flattery.  The most vicious
+kings are lauded, if only they have been 'erga servos Dei benevoli;'
+if they have founded monasteries; if they have respected the rights
+of the Church.  The clergy too often looked on the secular princes as
+more or less wild beasts, of whom neither common decency, justice, or
+mercy was to be expected; and they had too often reason enough to do
+so.  All that could be expected of the kings was, that if they would
+not regard man, they should at least fear God; which if they did, the
+proof of 'divine grace' on their part was so unexpected, as well as
+important, that the monk chroniclers praised them heartily and
+honestly, judging them by what they had, not by what they had not.
+
+Thus alone can one explain such a case as that of the monastic
+opinion of Dagobert the Second, king of the Franks.  We are told in
+the same narrative, seemingly without any great sense of incongruity,
+how he murdered his own relations and guests, and who not?--how he
+massacred 9000 Bulgars to whom he had given hospitality; how he kept
+a harem of three queens, and other women so numerous that Fredegarius
+cannot mention them; and also how, accompanied by his harem, he
+chanted among the monks of St. Denis; how he founded many rich
+convents; how he was the friend, or rather pupil, of St. Arnulf of
+Metz, St. Omer, and above all of St. Eloi--whose story I recommend
+you to read, charmingly told, in Mr. Maitland's 'Dark Ages,' pp. 81-
+122.  The three saints were no hypocrites--God forbid!  They were
+good men and true, to whom had been entrusted the keeping of a wild
+beast, to be petted and praised whenever it shewed any signs of
+humanity or obedience.
+
+But woe to the prince, however useful or virtuous in other respects,
+who laid sacrilegious hands on the goods of the Church.  He might,
+like Charles Martel, have delivered France from the Pagans on the
+east, and from the Mussulmen on the south, and have saved Christendom
+once and for all from the dominion of the Crescent, in that great
+battle on the plains of Poitiers, where the Arab cavalry (says
+Isidore of Beja) broke against the immoveable line of Franks, like
+'waves against a wall of ice.'
+
+But if, like Charles Martel, he had dared to demand of the Church
+taxes and contributions toward the support of his troops, and the
+salvation both of Church and commonweal, then all his prowess was in
+vain.  Some monk would surely see him in a vision, as St. Eucherius,
+Bishop of Orleans, saw Charles Martel (according to the Council of
+Kiersy), 'with Cain, Judas, and Caiaphas, thrust into the Stygian
+whirlpools and Acherontic combustion of the sempiternal Tartarus.'
+
+Those words, which, with slight variations, are a common formula of
+cursing appended to monastic charters against all who should infringe
+them, remind us rather of the sixth book of Virgil's AEneid than of
+the Holy Scriptures; and explain why Dante naturally chooses that
+poet as a guide through his Inferno.
+
+The cosmogony from which such an idea was derived was simple enough.
+I give, of course, no theological opinion on its correctness:  but as
+professor of Modern History, I am bound to set before you opinions
+which had the most enormous influence on the history of early Europe.
+Unless you keep them in mind, as the fixed and absolute background of
+all human thought and action for more than 1000 years, you will never
+be able to understand the doings of European men.
+
+This earth, then, or at least the habitable part of it, was
+considered as most probably a flat plane.  Below that plane, or in
+the centre of the earth, was the realm of endless fire.  It could be
+entered (as by the Welsh knight who went down into St. Patrick's
+Purgatory) by certain caves.  By listening at the craters of
+volcanoes, which were its mouths, the cries of the tortured might be
+heard in the depths of the earth.
+
+In that 'Tartarus' every human being born into the world was doomed
+to be endlessly burnt alive:  only in the Church, 'extra quam nulla
+salus,' was there escape from the common doom.  But to that doom,
+excommunication, which thrust a man from the pale of the Church,
+condemned the sinner afresh, with curses the most explicit and most
+horrible.
+
+The superior clergy, therefore, with whom the anathematizing power
+lay, believed firmly that they could, proprio motu, upon due cause
+shewn, cause any man or woman to be burned alive through endless
+ages.  And what was more, the Teutonic laity, with that intense awe
+of the unseen which they had brought with them out of the wilderness,
+believed it likewise, and trembled.  It paralysed the wisest, as well
+as the fiercest, that belief.  Instead of disgusting the kings of the
+earth, it gave them over, bound hand and foot by their own guilty
+consciences, into the dominion of the clergy; and the belief that
+Charles Martel was damned, only knit (as M. Sismondi well remarks)
+his descendants the Carlovingians more closely to the Church which
+possest so terrible a weapon.
+
+Whether they were right or wrong in these beliefs is a question not
+to be discussed in this chair.  My duty is only to point out to you
+the universal existence of those beliefs, and the historic fact that
+they gave the clergy a character supernatural, magical, divine, with
+a reserve of power before which all trembled, from the beggar to the
+king; and also, that all struggles between the temporal and spiritual
+powers, like that between Henry and Becket, can only be seen justly
+in the light of the practical meaning of that excommunication which
+Becket so freely employed.  I must also point out to you that so
+enormous a power (too great for the shoulders of mortal man) was
+certain to be, and actually was, fearfully abused, not only by its
+direct exercise, but also by bargaining with men, through indulgences
+and otherwise, for the remission of that punishment, which the clergy
+could, if they would, inflict; and worst of all, that out of the
+whole theory sprang up that system of persecution, in which the worst
+cruelties of heathen Rome were imitated by Christian priests, on the
+seemingly irrefragable ground that it was merciful to offenders to
+save them, or, if not, at least to save others through them, by
+making them feel for a few hours in this world what they would feel
+for endless ages in the next.
+
+
+
+LECTURE IX--THE MONK A CIVILIZER
+
+
+
+Historians are often blamed for writing as if the History of Kings
+and Princes were the whole history of the world.  'Why do you tell
+us,' is said, 'of nothing but the marriages, successions, wars,
+characters, of a few Royal Races?  We want to know what the people,
+and not the princes, were like.  History ought to be the history of
+the masses, and not of kings.'
+
+The only answer to this complaint seems to be, that the defect is
+unavoidable.  The history of the masses cannot be written, while they
+have no history; and none will they have, as long as they remain a
+mass; ere their history begins, individuals, few at first, and more
+and more numerous as they progress, must rise out of the mass, and
+become persons, with fixed ideas, determination, conscience, more or
+less different from their fellows, and thereby leavening and
+elevating their fellows, that they too may become persons, and men
+indeed.  Then they will begin to have a common history, issuing out
+of each man's struggle to assert his own personality and his own
+convictions.  Till that point is reached, the history of the masses
+will be mere statistic concerning their physical well-being or ill-
+being, which (for the early ages of our race) is unwritten, and
+therefore undiscoverable.
+
+The early history of the Teutonic race, therefore, is, and must
+always remain, simply the history of a few great figures.  Of the
+many of the masses, nothing is said; because there was nothing to
+say.  They all ate, drank, married, tilled, fought, and died, not
+altogether brutally, we will hope, but still in a dull monotony,
+unbroken by any struggle of principles or ideas.  We know that large
+masses of human beings have so lived in every age, and are living so
+now--the Tartar hordes, for instance, or the thriving negroes of
+central Africa:  comfortable folk, getting a tolerable living, son
+after father, for many generations, but certainly not developed
+enough, or afflicted enough, to have any history.
+
+I believe that the masses, during the early middle age, were very
+well off; quite as well off as they deserved; that is, earned for
+themselves.  They lived in a rough way, certainly:  but roughness is
+not discomfort, where the taste has not been educated.  A Red Indian
+sleeps as well in a wigwam as we in a spring bed; and the Irish
+babies thrive as well among the peat ashes as on a Brussels carpet.
+Man is a very well constructed being, and can live and multiply
+anywhere, provided he can keep warm, and get pure water and enough to
+eat.  Indeed, our Teutonic fathers must have been comfortably off, or
+they could not have multiplied as they did.  Even though their
+numbers may have been overstated, the fact is patent, that howsoever
+they were slaughtered down, by the Romans or by each other, they rose
+again as out of the soil, more numerous than ever.  Again and again
+you read of a tribe being all but exterminated by the Romans, and in
+a few years find it bursting over the Pfalzgrab or the Danube, more
+numerous and terrible than before.  Never believe that a people
+deprest by cold, ill-feeding, and ill-training, could have conquered
+Europe in the face of centuries of destructive war.  Those very wars,
+again, may have helped in the long run the increase of population,
+and for a reason simple enough, though often overlooked.  War throws
+land out of cultivation; and when peace returns, the new settlers
+find the land fallow, and more or less restored to its original
+fertility; and so begins a period of rapid and prosperous increase.
+In no other way can I explain the rate at which nations after the
+most desolating wars spring up, young and strong again, like the
+phoenix, from their own funeral pile.  They begin afresh as the
+tillers of a virgin soil, fattened too often with the ashes of burnt
+homesteads, and the blood of the slain.
+
+Another element of comfort may have been the fact, that in the rough
+education of the forest, only the strong and healthy children lived,
+while the weakly died off young, and so the labour-market, as we
+should say now, was never overstocked.  This is the case with our own
+gipsies, and with many savage tribes--the Red Indians, for instance--
+and accounts for their general healthiness:  the unhealthy being all
+dead, in the first struggle for existence.  But then these gipsies,
+and the Red Indians, do not increase in numbers, but the contrary;
+while our forefathers increased rapidly.  On the other hand, we have,
+at least throughout the middle ages, accounts of such swarms of
+cripples, lepers, deformed, and other incapable persons, as to make
+some men believe that there were more of them, in proportion to the
+population, than there are now.  And it may have been so.  The
+strongest and healthiest men always going off to be killed in war,
+the weakliest only would be left at home to breed; and so an
+unhealthy population might spring up.  And again--and this is a
+curious fact--as law and order enter a country, so will the
+proportion of incapables, in body and mind, increase.  In times of
+war and anarchy, when every one is shifting for himself, only the
+strongest and shrewdest can stand.  Woe to those who cannot take care
+of themselves.  The fools and cowards, the weakly and sickly, are
+killed, starved, neglected, or in other ways brought to grief.  But
+when law and order come, they protect those who cannot protect
+themselves, and the fools and cowards, the weakly and sickly, are
+supported at the public expense, and allowed to increase and multiply
+as public burdens.  I do not say that this is wrong, Heaven forbid!
+I only state the fact.  A government is quite right in defending all
+alike from the brute competition of nature, whose motto is--Woe to
+the weak.  To the Church of the middle age is due the preaching and
+the practice of the great Christian doctrine, that society is bound
+to protect the weak.  So far the middle age saw:  but no further.
+For our own times has been reserved the higher and deeper doctrine,
+that it is the duty of society to make the weak strong; to reform, to
+cure, and above all, to prevent by education, by sanitary science, by
+all and every means, the necessity of reforming and of curing.
+
+Science could not do that in the middle age.  But if Science could
+not do it, Religion would at least try to do the next best thing to
+it.  The monasteries were the refuges, whither the weak escaped from
+the competition of the strong.  Thither flocked the poor, the
+crippled, the orphan, and the widow, all, in fact, who could not
+fight for themselves.  There they found something like justice,
+order, pity, help.  Even the fool and the coward, when they went to
+the convent-door, were not turned away.  The poor half-witted rascal,
+who had not sense enough to serve the king, might still serve the
+abbot.  He would be set to drive, plough, or hew wood--possibly by
+the side of a gentleman, a nobleman, or even a prince--and live under
+equal law with them; and under, too, a discipline more strict than
+that of any modern army; and if he would not hew the wood, or drive
+the bullocks, as he ought, then the abbot would have him flogged
+soundly till he did; which was better for him, after all, than
+wandering about to be hooted by the boys, and dying in a ditch at
+last.
+
+The coward, too--the abbot could make him of use, even though the
+king could not.  There were, no doubt, in those days, though fewer in
+number than now, men who could not face physical danger, and the
+storm of the evil world,--delicate, nervous, imaginative, feminine
+characters; who, when sent out to battle, would be very likely to run
+away.  Our forefathers, having no use for such persons, used to put
+such into a bog-hole, and lay a hurdle over them, in the belief that
+they would sink to the lowest pool of Hela for ever more.  But the
+abbot had great use for such.  They could learn to read, write, sing,
+think; they were often very clever; they might make great scholars;
+at all events they might make saints.  Whatever they could not do,
+they could pray.  And the united prayer of those monks, it was then
+believed, could take heaven by storm, alter the course of the
+elements, overcome Divine justice, avert from mankind the anger of an
+offended God.  Whether that belief were right or wrong, people held
+it; and the man who could not fight with carnal weapons, regained his
+self-respect, and therefore his virtue, when he found himself
+fighting, as he held, with spiritual weapons against all the powers
+of darkness {p214}.  The first light in which I wish you to look at
+the old monasteries, is as defences for the weak against the strong.
+
+But what has this to do with what I said at first, as to the masses
+having no history?  This:- that through these monasteries the masses
+began first to have a history; because through them they ceased to be
+masses, and became first, persons and men, and then, gradually, a
+people.  That last the monasteries could not make them:  but they
+educated them for becoming a people; and in this way.  They brought
+out, in each man, the sense of individual responsibility.  They
+taught him, whether warrior or cripple, prince or beggar, that he had
+an immortal soul, for which each must give like account to God.
+
+Do you not see the effect of that new thought?  Treated as slaves, as
+things and animals, the many had learnt to consider themselves as
+things and animals.  And so they had become 'a mass,' that is, a mere
+heap of inorganic units, each of which has no spring of life in
+itself as distinguished from a whole, a people, which has one bond,
+uniting each to all.  The 'masses' of the French had fallen into that
+state, before the Revolution of 1793.  The 'masses' of our
+agricultural labourers,--the 'masses' of our manufacturing workmen,
+were fast falling into that state in the days of our grandfathers.
+Whether the French masses have risen out of it, remains to be seen.
+The English masses, thanks to Almighty God, have risen out of it; and
+by the very same factor by which the middle-age masses rose--by
+Religion.  The great Methodist movement of the last century did for
+our masses, what the monks did for our forefathers in the middle age.
+Wesley and Whitfield, and many another noble soul, said to Nailsea
+colliers, Cornish miners, and all manner of drunken brutalized
+fellows, living like the beasts that perish,--'Each of you--thou--and
+thou--and thou--stand apart and alone before God.  Each has an
+immortal soul in him, which will be happy or miserable for ever,
+according to the deeds done in the body.  A whole eternity of shame
+or of glory lies in you--and you are living like a beast.'  And in
+proportion as each man heard that word, and took it home to himself,
+he became a new man, and a true man.  The preachers may have mixed up
+words with their message with which we may disagree, have appealed to
+low hopes and fears which we should be ashamed to bring into our
+calculations;--so did the monks:  but they got their work done
+somehow; and let us thank them, and the old Methodists, and any man
+who will tell men, in whatever clumsy and rough fashion, that they
+are not things, and pieces of a mass, but persons, with an
+everlasting duty, an everlasting right and wrong, an everlasting God
+in whose presence they stand, and who will judge them according to
+their works.  True, that is not all that men need to learn.  After
+they are taught, each apart, that he is a man, they must be taught,
+how to be an united people:  but the individual teaching must come
+first; and before we hastily blame the individualizing tendencies of
+the old Evangelical movement, or that of the middle-age monks, let us
+remember, that if they had not laid the foundation, others could not
+build thereon.
+
+Besides, they built themselves, as well as they could, on their own
+foundation.  As soon as men begin to be really men, the desire of
+corporate life springs up in them.  They must unite; they must
+organize themselves.  If they possess duties, they must be duties to
+their fellow-men; if they possess virtues and graces, they must mix
+with their fellow-men in order to exercise them.
+
+The solitaries of the Thebaid found that they became selfish wild
+beasts, or went mad, if they remained alone; and they formed
+themselves into lauras, 'lanes' of huts, convents, under a common
+abbot or father.  The evangelical converts of the last century formed
+themselves into powerful and highly organized sects.  The middle-age
+monasteries organized themselves into highly artificial communities
+round some sacred spot, generally under the supposed protection of
+some saint or martyr, whose bones lay there.  Each method was good,
+though not the highest.  None of them rises to the idea of a people,
+having one national life, under one monarch, the representative to
+each and all of that national life, and the dispenser and executor of
+its laws.  Indeed, the artificial organization, whether monastic or
+sectarian, may become so strong as to interfere with national life,
+and make men forget their real duty to their king and country, in
+their self-imposed duty to the sect or order to which they belong.
+The monastic organization indeed had to die, in many countries, in
+order that national life might develop itself; and the dissolution of
+the monasteries marks the birth of an united and powerful England.
+They or Britain must have died.  An imperium in imperio--much more
+many separate imperia--was an element of national weakness, which
+might be allowed in times of peace and safety, but not in times of
+convulsion and of danger.
+
+You may ask, however, how these monasteries became so powerful, if
+they were merely refuges for the weak?  Even if they were (and they
+were) the homes of an equal justice and order, mercy and beneficence,
+which had few or no standing-places outside their walls, still, how,
+if governed by weak men, could they survive in the great battle of
+life?  The sheep would have but a poor life of it, if they set up
+hurdles against the wolves, and agreed at all events not to eat each
+other.
+
+The answer is, that the monasteries were not altogether tenanted by
+incapables.  The same causes which brought the low-born into the
+monasteries, brought the high-born, many of the very highest.  The
+same cause which brought the weak into the monasteries, brought the
+strong, many of the very strongest.
+
+The middle-age records give us a long list of kings, princes, nobles,
+who having done (as they held) their work in the world outside, went
+into those convents to try their hands at what seemed to them (and
+often was) better work than the perpetual coil of war, intrigue, and
+ambition, which was not the crime, but the necessary fate, of a ruler
+in the middle ages.  Tired of work, and tired of life; tired too, of
+vain luxury and vain wealth, they fled to the convent, as to the only
+place where a man could get a little peace, and think of God, and his
+own soul; and recollected, as they worked with their own hands by the
+side of the lowest-born of their subjects, that they had a human
+flesh and blood, a human immortal soul, like those whom they had
+ruled.  Thank God that the great have other methods now of learning
+that great truth; that the work of life, if but well done, will teach
+it to them:  but those were hard times, and wild times; and fighting
+men could hardly learn, save in the convent, that there was a God
+above who watched the widows' and the orphans' tears, and when he
+made inquisition for blood, forgot not the cause of the poor.
+
+Such men and women of rank brought into the convent, meanwhile, all
+the prestige of their rank, all their superior knowledge of the
+world; and became the patrons and protectors of the society; while
+they submitted, generally with peculiar humility and devotion, to its
+most severe and degrading rules.  Their higher sensibilities, instead
+of making them shrink from hardship, made them strong to endure self-
+sacrifices, and often self-tortures, which seem to us all but
+incredible; and the lives, or rather living deaths, of the noble and
+princely penitents of the early middle age, are among the most
+beautiful tragedies of humanity.
+
+To these monasteries, too, came the men of the very highest
+intellect, of whatsoever class.  I say, of the very highest
+intellect.  Tolerably talented men might find it worth while to stay
+in the world, and use their wits in struggling upward there.  The
+most talented of all would be the very men to see a better 'carriere
+ouverte aux talens' than the world could give; to long for deeper and
+loftier meditation than could be found in the court; for a more
+divine life, a more blessed death, than could be found in the camp
+and the battle-field.
+
+And so it befals, that in the early middle age the cleverest men were
+generally inside the convent, trying, by moral influence and superior
+intellect, to keep those outside from tearing each other to pieces.
+
+But these intellects could not remain locked up in the monasteries.
+The daily routine of devotion, even of silent study and
+contemplation, was not sufficient for them, as it was for the average
+monk.  There was still a reserve of force in them, which must be up
+and doing; and which, in a man inspired by that Spirit which is the
+Spirit of love to man as well as to God, must needs expand outwards
+in all directions, to Christianize, to civilize, to colonize.
+
+To colonize.  When people talk loosely of founding an abbey for
+superstitious uses, they cannot surely be aware of the state of the
+countries in which those abbeys were founded; either primaeval
+forest, hardly-tilled common, or to be described by that terrible
+epithet of Domesday-book, 'wasta'--wasted by war.  A knowledge of
+that fact would lead them to guess that there were almost certainly
+uses for the abbey which had nothing to do with superstition; which
+were as thoroughly practical as those of a company for draining the
+bog of Allen, or running a railroad through an American forest.
+Such, at least, was the case, at least for the first seven centuries
+after the fall of Rome; and to these missionary colonizers Europe
+owes, I verily believe, among a hundred benefits, this which all
+Englishmen will appreciate; that Roman agriculture not only revived
+in the countries which were once the Empire, but spread from thence
+eastward and northward, into the principal wilderness of the Teuton
+and Sclavonic races.
+
+I cannot, I think, shew you better what manner of men these monk-
+colonizers were, and what sort of work they did, than by giving you
+the biography of one of them; and out of many I have chosen that of
+St. Sturmi, founder whilome of the great abbey of Fulda, which lies
+on the central watershed of Germany, about equidistant, to speak
+roughly, from Frankfort, Cassel, Gotha, and Coburg.
+
+His life is matter of history, written by one Eigils (sainted like
+himself), who was his disciple and his friend.  Naturally told it is,
+and lovingly; but if I recollect right, without a single miracle or
+myth; the living contemporaneous picture of such a man, living in
+such a state of society, as we shall never (and happily need never)
+see again, but which is for that very reason worthy to be preserved,
+for a token that wisdom is justified of all her children.
+
+It stands at length in Pertz's admirable 'Monumenta Historica,' among
+many another like biography, and if I tell it here somewhat at
+length, readers must forgive me.
+
+Every one has heard of little king Pepin, and many may have heard
+also how he was a mighty man of valour, and cut off a lion's head at
+one blow; and how he was a crafty statesman, and first consolidated
+the temporal power of the Popes, and helped them in that detestable
+crime of overthrowing the noble Lombard kingdom, which cost Italy
+centuries of slavery and shame, and which has to be expiated even
+yet, it would seem, by some fearful punishment.
+
+But every one may not know that Pepin had great excuses--if not for
+helping to destroy the Lombards--yet still for supporting the power
+of the Popes.  It seemed to him--and perhaps it was--the only
+practical method of uniting the German tribes into one common people,
+and stopping the internecine wars by which they were tearing
+themselves to pieces.  It seemed to him--and perhaps it was--the only
+practical method for civilizing and Christianizing the still wild
+tribes, Frisians, Saxons, and Sclaves, who pressed upon the German
+marches, from the mouth of the Elbe to the very Alps.  Be that as it
+may, he began the work; and his son Charlemagne finished it; somewhat
+well, and again somewhat ill--as most work, alas! is done on earth.
+Now in the days of little king Pepin there was a nobleman of Bavaria,
+and his wife, who had a son called Sturmi; and they brought him to
+St. Boniface, that he might make him a priest.  And the child loved
+St. Boniface's noble English face, and went with him willingly, and
+was to him as a son.  And who was St. Boniface?  That is a long
+story.  Suffice it that he was a man of Devon, brought up in a
+cloister at Exeter; and that he had crossed over into Frankenland,
+upon the lower Rhine, and become a missionary of the widest and
+loftiest aims; not merely a preacher and winner of souls, though
+that, it is said, in perfection; but a civilizer, a colonizer, a
+statesman.  He, and many another noble Englishman and Scot (whether
+Irish or Caledonian) were working under the Frank kings to convert
+the heathens of the marches, and carry the Cross into the far East.
+They led lives of poverty and danger; they were martyred, half of
+them, as St. Boniface was at last.  But they did their work; and
+doubtless they have their reward.  They did their best, according to
+their light.  God grant that we, to whom so much more light has been
+given, may do our best likewise.  Under this great genius was young
+Sturmi trained.  Trained (as was perhaps needed for those who had to
+do such work in such a time) to have neither wife, nor child, nor
+home, nor penny in his purse; but to do all that he was bid, learn
+all that he could, and work for his living with his own hands; a life
+of bitter self-sacrifice.  Such a life is not needed now.  Possibly,
+nevertheless, it was needed then.
+
+So St. Boniface took Sturmi about with him in his travels, and at
+last handed him over to Wigbert, the priest, to prepare him for the
+ministry.  'Under whom,' says his old chronicler, 'the boy began to
+know the Psalms thoroughly by heart; to understand the Holy
+Scriptures of Christ with spiritual sense; took care to learn most
+studiously the mysteries of the four Gospels, and to bury in his
+heart, by assiduous reading, the treasures of the Old and New
+Testament.  For his meditation was in the Law of the Lord day and
+night; profound in understanding, shrewd of thought, prudent of
+speech, fair of face, sober of carriage, honourable in morals,
+spotless in life, by sweetness, humility, and alacrity, he drew to
+him the love of all.'
+
+He grew to be a man; and in due time he was ordained priest, 'by the
+will and consent of all;' and he 'began to preach the words of Christ
+earnestly to the people;' and his preaching wrought wonders among
+them.
+
+Three years he preached in his Rhineland parish, winning love from
+all.  But in the third year 'a heavenly thought' came into his mind
+that he would turn hermit and dwell in the wild forest.  And why?
+Who can tell?  He may, likely enough, have found celibacy a fearful
+temptation for a young and eloquent man, and longed to flee from the
+sight of that which must not be his.  And that, in his circumstances,
+was not a foolish wish.  He may have wished to escape, if but once,
+from the noise and crowd of outward things, and be alone with God and
+Christ, and his own soul.  And that was not a foolish wish.  John
+Bunyan so longed, and found what he wanted in Bedford Jail, and set
+it down and printed it in a Pilgrim's Progress, which will live as
+long as man is man.  George Fox longed for it, and made himself
+clothes of leather which would not wear out, and lived in a hollow
+tree, till he, too, set down the fruit of his solitude in a diary
+which will live likewise as long as man is man.  Perhaps, again,
+young Sturmi longed to try for once in a way what he was worth upon
+God's earth; how much he could endure; what power he had of helping
+himself, what courage to live by his own wits, and God's mercy, on
+roots and fruits, as wild things live.  And surely that was not
+altogether a foolish wish.  At least, he longed to be a hermit; but
+he kept his longing to himself, however, till St. Boniface, his
+bishop, appeared; and then he told him all his heart.
+
+And St. Boniface said:  'Go; in the name of God;' and gave him two
+comrades, and sent him into 'the wilderness which is called Buchonia,
+the Beech Forest, to find a place fit for the servants of the Lord to
+dwell in.  For the Lord is able to provide his people a home in the
+desert.'
+
+So those three went into the wild forest.  And 'for three days they
+saw nought but earth and sky and mighty trees.  And they went on,
+praying Christ that He would guide their feet into the way of peace.
+And on the third day they came to the place which is called Hersfelt
+(the hart's down?), and searched it round, and prayed that Christ
+would bless the place for them to dwell in; and then they built
+themselves little huts of beech-bark, and abode there many days,
+serving God with holy fastings, and watchings, and prayers.'
+
+Is it not a strange story? so utterly unlike anything which we see
+now;--so utterly unlike anything which we ought to see now?  And yet
+it may have been good in its time.  It looks out on us from the dim
+ages, like the fossil bone of some old monster cropping out of a
+quarry.  But the old monster was good in his place and time.  God
+made him and had need of him.  It may be that God made those three
+poor monks, and had need of them likewise.
+
+As for their purposes being superstitious, we shall be better able to
+judge of that when we have seen what they were--what sort of a house
+they meant to build to God.  As for their having self-interest in
+view, no doubt they thought that they should benefit their own souls
+in this life, and in the life to come.  But one would hardly blame
+them for that, surely?
+
+One would not blame them as selfish and sordid if they had gone out
+on a commercial speculation?  Why, then, if on a religious one?  The
+merchant adventurer is often a noble type of man, and one to whom the
+world owes much, though his hands are not always clean, nor his eye
+single.  The monk adventurer of the middle age is, perhaps, a still
+nobler type of man, and one to whom the world owes more, though his
+eye, too, was not always single, nor his hands clean.
+
+As for selfishness, one must really bear in mind that men who walked
+away into that doleful 'urwarld' had need to pray very literally
+'that Christ would guide their feet into the way of peace;' and must
+have cared as much for their wordly interests as those who march up
+to the cannon's mouth.  Their lives in that forest were not worth
+twenty-four hours' purchase, and they knew it.  It is an ugly thing
+for an unarmed man, without a compass, to traverse the bush of
+Australia or New Zealand, where there are no wild beasts.  But it was
+uglier still to start out under the dark roof of that primaeval wood.
+Knights, when they rode it, went armed cap-a-pie, like Sintram
+through the dark valley, trusting in God and their good sword.
+Chapmen and merchants stole through it by a few tracks in great
+companies, armed with bill and bow.  Peasants ventured into it a few
+miles, to cut timber, and find pannage for their swine, and whispered
+wild legends of the ugly things therein--and sometimes, too, never
+came home.  Away it stretched from the fair Rhineland, wave after
+wave of oak and alder, beech and pine, God alone knew how far, into
+the land of night and wonder, and the infinite unknown; full of elk
+and bison, bear and wolf, lynx and glutton, and perhaps of worse
+beasts still.  Worse beasts, certainly, Sturmi and his comrades would
+have met, if they had met them in human form.  For there were waifs
+and strays of barbarism there, uglier far than any waif and stray of
+civilization, border ruffian of the far west, buccaneer of the Tropic
+keys, Cimaroon of the Panama forests; men verbiesterte, turned into
+the likeness of beasts, wildfanger, huner, ogres, wehr-wolves, strong
+thieves and outlaws, many of them possibly mere brutal maniacs;
+naked, living in caves and coverts, knowing no law but their own
+hunger, rage, and lust; feeding often on human flesh; and woe to the
+woman or child or unarmed man who fell into their ruthless clutch.
+Orson, and such like human brutes of the wilderness, serve now to
+amuse children in fairy tales; they were then ugly facts of flesh and
+blood.  There were heathens there, too, in small colonies:  heathen
+Saxons, cruelest of all the tribes; who worshipped at the Irmensul,
+and had an old blood-feud against the Franks; heathen Thuringer, who
+had murdered St. Kilian the Irishman at Wurzburg; heathen Slaves, of
+different tribes, who had introduced into Europe the custom of
+impaling their captives:  and woe to the Christian priest who fell
+into any of their hands.  To be knocked on the head before some ugly
+idol was the gentlest death which they were like to have.  They would
+have called that martyrdom, and the gate of eternal bliss; but they
+were none the less brave men for going out to face it.
+
+And beside all these, and worse than all these, there were the
+terrors of the unseen world; very real in those poor monks' eyes,
+though not in ours.  There were Nixes in the streams, and Kobolds in
+the caves, and Tannhauser in the dark pine-glades, who hated the
+Christian man, and would lure him to his death.  There were fair
+swan-maidens and elf-maidens; nay, dame Venus herself, and Herodias
+the dancer, with all their rout of revellers; who would tempt him to
+sin, and having made him sell his soul, destroy both body and soul in
+hell.  There was Satan and all the devils, too, plotting to stop the
+Christian man from building the house of the Lord, and preaching the
+gospel to the heathen; ready to call up storms, and floods, and
+forest fires; to hurl the crag down from the cliffs, or drop the
+rotting tree on their defenceless heads--all real and terrible in
+those poor monks' eyes, as they walked on, singing their psalms, and
+reading their Gospels, and praying to God to save them, for they
+could not save themselves; and to guide them, for they knew not, like
+Abraham, whither they went; and to show them the place where they
+should build the house of the Lord, and preach righteousness, peace,
+and joy in the Holy Spirit to the heathen round.  We talk still,
+thank heaven, of heroes, and understand what that great word should
+mean.  But were not these poor monks heroes?  Knights-errant of God,
+doing his work as they best knew how.  We have a purer gospel than
+they:  we understand our Bibles better.  But if they had not done
+what they did, where would have been now our gospel, and our Bible?
+We cannot tell.  It was a wise old saw of our forefathers--'Do not
+speak ill of the bridge which carries you over.'
+
+If Sturmi had had a 'holy longing' to get into the wild wood, now he
+had a 'holy longing' to go back; and to find St. Boniface, and tell
+him what a pleasant place Hersfelt was, and the quality of the soil,
+and the direction of the watershed, and the meadows, and springs, and
+so forth, in a very practical way.  And St. Boniface answered, that
+the place seemed good enough; but that he was afraid for them, on
+account of the savage heathen Saxons.  They must go deeper into the
+forest, and then they would be safe.  So he went back to his fellow-
+hermits, and they made to themselves a canoe; and went paddling up
+and down the Fulda stream, beneath the alder boughs, 'trying the
+mouths of the mountain-streams, and landing to survey the hills and
+ridges,'--pioneers of civilization none the less because they
+pioneered in the name of Him who made earth and heaven:  but they
+found nothing which they thought would suit the blessed St. Boniface,
+save that they stayed a little at the place which is called Ruohen-
+bah, 'the rough brook,' to see if it would suit; but it would not.
+So they went back to their birch huts to fast and pray once more.
+
+St. Boniface sent for Sturmi after awhile, probably to Maintz, to ask
+of his success; and Sturmi threw himself on his face before him; and
+Boniface raised him up, and kissed him, and made him sit by his side-
+-which was a mighty honour; for St. Boniface, the penniless monk, was
+at that moment one of the most powerful men of Europe; and he gave
+Sturmi a good dinner, of which, no doubt, he stood in need; and bade
+him keep up heart, and seek again for the place which God had surely
+prepared, and would reveal in His good time.
+
+And this time Sturmi, probably wiser from experience, determined to
+go alone; but not on foot.  So he took to him a trusty ass, and as
+much food as he could pack on it; and, axe in hand, rode away into
+the wild wood, singing his psalms.  And every night, before he lay
+down to sleep, he cut boughs, and stuck them up for a ring fence
+round him and the ass, to the discomfiture of the wolves, which had,
+and have still, a great hankering after asses' flesh.  It is a quaint
+picture, no doubt; but let us respect it, while we smile at it; if
+we, too, be brave men.
+
+Then one day he fell into a great peril.  He came to the old road (a
+Roman one, I presume; for the Teutons, whether in England or
+elsewhere, never dreamed of making roads till three hundred years
+ago, but used the old Roman ones), which led out of the Thuringen
+land to Maintz.  And at the ford over the Fulda he met a great
+multitude bathing, of Sclavonian heathens, going to the fair at
+Maintz.  And they smelt so strong, the foul miscreants, that Sturmi's
+donkey backed, and refused to face them; and Sturmi himself was much
+of the donkey's mind, for they began to mock him (possibly he nearly
+went over the donkey's head), and went about to hurt him.
+
+'But,' says the chronicler, 'the power of the Lord held them back.'
+
+Then he went on, right thankful at having escaped with his life, up
+and down, round and round, exploring and surveying--for what purpose
+we shall see hereafter.  And at last he lost himself in the place
+which is called Aihen-loh, 'the glade of oaks;' and at night-fall he
+heard the plash of water, and knew not whether man or wild beast made
+it.  And not daring to call out, he tapped a tree-trunk with his axe
+(some backwoodsman's sign of those days, we may presume), and he was
+answered.  And a forester came to him, leading his lord's horse; a
+man from the Wetterau, who knew the woods far and wide, and told him
+all that he wanted to know.  And they slept side by side that night;
+and in the morning they blest each other, and each went his way.
+
+Yes, there were not merely kings and wars, popes and councils, in
+those old days;--there were real human beings, just such as we might
+meet by the wayside any hour, with human hearts and histories within
+them.  And we will be thankful if but one of them, now and then,
+starts up out of the darkness of twelve hundred years, like that good
+forester, and looks at us with human eyes, and goes his way again,
+blessing, and not unblest.
+
+And now Sturmi knew all that he needed to know; and after awhile,
+following the counsel of the forester, he came to 'the blessed place,
+long ago prepared of the Lord.  And when he saw it, he was filled
+with immense joy, and went on exulting; for he felt that by the
+merits and prayers of the holy Bishop Boniface that place had been
+revealed to him.  And he went about it, and about it, half the day;
+and the more he looked on it the more he gave God thanks;' and those
+who know Fulda say, that Sturmi had reason to give God thanks, and
+must have had a keen eye, moreover, for that which man needs for
+wealth and prosperity, in soil and water, meadow and wood.  So he
+blessed the place, and signed it with the sign of the Cross (in token
+that it belonged thenceforth neither to devils nor fairies, but to
+his rightful Lord and Maker), and went back to his cell, and thence a
+weary journey to St. Boniface, to tell him of the fair place which he
+had found at last.
+
+And St. Boniface went his weary way, either to Paris or to Aix, to
+Pepin and Carloman, kings of the Franks; and begged of them a grant
+of the Aihenloh, and all the land for four miles round, and had it.
+And the nobles about gave up to him their rights of venison, and
+vert, and pasture, and pannage of swine; and Sturmi and seven
+brethren set out thither, 'in the year of our Lord 744, in the first
+month (April, presumably), in the twelfth day of the month, unto the
+place prepared of the Lord,' that they might do what?
+
+That they might build an abbey.  Yes; but the question is, what
+building an abbey meant, not three hundred, nor five hundred, but
+eleven hundred years ago--for centuries are long matters, and men and
+their works change in them.
+
+And then it meant this:  Clearing the back woods for a Christian
+settlement; an industrial colony, in which every man was expected to
+spend his life in doing good--all and every good which he could for
+his fellow-men.  Whatever talent he had he threw into the common
+stock; and worked, as he was found fit to work, at farming,
+gardening, carpentering, writing, doctoring, teaching in the schools,
+or preaching to the heathen round.  In their common church they met
+to worship God; but also to ask for grace and strength to do their
+work, as Christianizers and civilizers of mankind.  What Christianity
+and civilization they knew (and they knew more than we are apt now to
+believe) they taught it freely; and therefore they were loved, and
+looked up to as superior beings, as modern missionaries, wherever
+they do their work even decently well, are looked up to now.
+
+So because the work could be done in that way, and (as far as men
+then, or now, can see) in no other way, Pepin and Carloman gave
+Boniface the glade of oaks, that they might clear the virgin forest,
+and extend cultivation, and win fresh souls to Christ, instead of
+fighting, like the kings of this world, for the land which was
+already cleared, and the people who were already Christian.
+
+In two months' time they had cut down much of the forest; and then
+came St. Boniface himself to see them, and with him a great company
+of workmen, and chose a place for a church.  And St. Boniface went up
+to the hill which is yet called Bishop's Mount, that he might read
+his Bible in peace, away from kings and courts, and the noise of the
+wicked world; and his workmen felled trees innumerable, and dug peat
+to burn lime withal; and then all went back again, and left the
+settlers to thrive and work.
+
+And thrive and work they did, clearing more land, building their
+church, ploughing up their farm, drawing to them more and more
+heathen converts, more and more heathen school-children; and St.
+Boniface came to see them from time to time, whenever he could get a
+holiday, and spent happy days in prayer and study, with his pupil and
+friend.  And ten years after, when St. Boniface was martyred at last
+by the Friesland heathens, and died, as he had lived, like an apostle
+of God, then all the folk of Maintz wanted to bring his corpse home
+to their town, because he had been Archbishop there.  But he
+'appeared in a dream to a certain deacon, and said:  "Why delay ye to
+take me home to Fulda, to my rest in the wilderness which God bath
+prepared for me?"'
+
+So St. Boniface sleeps at Fulda,--unless the French Republican armies
+dug up his bones, and scattered them, as they scattered holier
+things, to the winds of heaven.  And all men came to worship at his
+tomb, after the fashion of those days.  And Fulda became a noble
+abbey, with its dom-church, library, schools, workshops, farmsteads,
+almshouses, and all the appanages of such a place, in the days when
+monks were monks indeed.  And Sturmi became a great man, and went
+through many troubles and slanders, and conquered in them all,
+because there was no fault found in him, as in Daniel of old; and
+died in a good old age, bewept by thousands, who, but for him, would
+have been heathens still.  And the Aihen-loh became rich corn-land
+and garden, and Fulda an abbey borough and a principality, where men
+lived in peace under mild rule, while the feudal princes quarrelled
+and fought outside; and a great literary centre, whose old records
+are now precious to the diggers among the bones of bygone times; and
+at last St. Sturmi and the Aihen-lob had so developed themselves,
+that the latest record of the Abbots of Fulda which I have seen is
+this, bearing date about 1710:-
+
+'The arms of the most illustrious Lord and Prince, Abbot of Fulda,
+Archchancellor of the most Serene Empress, Primate of all Germany and
+Gaul, and Prince of the Holy Roman Empire.'  Developed, certainly:
+and not altogether in the right direction.  For instead of the small
+beer, which they had promised St. Boniface to drink to the end of the
+world, the abbots of Fulda had the best wine in Germany, and the best
+table too.  Be that as it may, to have cleared the timber off the
+Aihen-lob, and planted a Christian colony instead, was enough to make
+St. Sturmi hope that he had not read his Bible altogether in vain.
+
+Surely such men as St. Sturmi were children of wisdom, put what sense
+on the word you will.  In a dark, confused, lawless, cut-throat age,
+while everything was decided by the sword, they found that they could
+do no good to themselves, or any man, by throwing their swords into
+either scale.  They would be men of peace, and see what could be done
+so.  Was that not wise?  So they set to work.  They feared God
+exceedingly, and walked with God.  Was not that wise?  They wrought
+righteousness, and were merciful and kind, while kings and nobles
+were murdering around them; pure and temperate, while other men were
+lustful and drunken; just and equal in all their ways, while other
+men were unjust and capricious; serving God faithfully, according to
+their light, while the people round them were half or wholly heathen;
+content to do their work well on earth, and look for their reward in
+heaven, while the kings and nobles, the holders of the land, were
+full of insane ambition, every man trying to seize a scrap of ground
+from his neighbour, as if that would make them happier.  Was that not
+wise?  Which was the wiser, the chief killing human beings, to take
+from them some few square miles which men had brought into
+cultivation already, or the monk, leaving the cultivated land, and
+going out into the backwoods to clear the forest, and till the virgin
+soil?  Which was the child of wisdom, I ask again?  And do not tell
+me that the old monk worked only for fanatical and superstitious
+ends.  It is not so.  I know well his fanaticism and his
+superstition, and the depths of its ignorance and silliness:  but he
+had more in him than that.  Had he not, he would have worked no
+lasting work.  He was not only the pioneer of civilization, but he
+knew that he was such.  He believed that all knowledge came from God,
+even that which taught a man to clear the forest, and plant corn
+instead; and he determined to spread such knowledge as he had
+wherever he could.  He was a wiser man than the heathen Saxons, even
+than the Christian Franks, around him; a better scholar, a better
+thinker, better handicraftsman, better farmer; and he did not keep
+his knowledge to himself.  He did not, as some tell you, keep the
+Bible to himself.  It is not so; and those who say so, in this
+generation, ought to be ashamed of themselves.  The monk knew his
+Bible well himself, and he taught it.  Those who learnt from him to
+read, learnt to read their Bibles.  Those who did not learn (of
+course the vast majority, in days when there was no printing), he
+taught by sermons, by pictures, afterward by mystery and miracle
+plays.  The Bible was not forbidden to the laity till centuries
+afterwards--and forbidden then, why?  Because the laity throughout
+Europe knew too much about the Bible, and not too little.  Because
+the early monks had so ingrained the mind of the masses, throughout
+Christendom, with Bible stories, Bible personages, the great facts,
+and the great doctrines, of our Lord's life, that the masses knew too
+much; that they could contrast too easily, and too freely, the fallen
+and profligate monks of the 15th and 16th centuries, with those Bible
+examples, which the old monks of centuries before had taught their
+forefathers.  Then the clergy tried to keep from the laity, because
+it testified against themselves, the very book which centuries before
+they had taught them to love and know too well.  In a word, the old
+monk missionary taught all he knew to all who would learn, just as
+our best modern missionaries do; and was loved, and obeyed, and
+looked on as a superior being, as they are.
+
+Of course he did not know how far civilization would extend.  He
+could not foretell railroads and electric telegraphs, any more than
+he could political economy, or sanitary science.  But the best that
+he knew, he taught--and did also, working with his own hands.  He was
+faithful in a few things, and God made him ruler over many things.
+For out of those monasteries sprang--what did not spring?  They
+restored again and again sound law and just government, when the good
+old Teutonic laws, and the Roman law also, was trampled underfoot
+amid the lawless strife of ambition and fury.  Under their shadow
+sprang up the towns with their corporate rights, their middle
+classes, their artizan classes.  They were the physicians, the alms-
+givers, the relieving officers, the schoolmasters of the middle-age
+world.  They first taught us the great principle of the division of
+labour, to which we owe, at this moment, that England is what she is,
+instead of being covered with a horde of peasants, each making and
+producing everything for himself, and starving each upon his rood of
+ground.  They transcribed or composed all the books of the then
+world; many of them spent their lives in doing nothing but writing;
+and the number of books, even of those to be found in single
+monasteries, considering the tedious labour of copying, is altogether
+astonishing.  They preserved to us the treasures of classical
+antiquity.  They discovered for us the germs of all our modern
+inventions.  They brought in from abroad arts and new knowledge; and
+while they taught men to know that they had a common humanity, a
+common Father in heaven taught them also to profit by each other's
+wisdom instead of remaining in isolated ignorance.  They, too, were
+the great witnesses against feudal caste.  With them was neither
+high-born nor low-born, rich nor poor:  worth was their only test;
+the meanest serf entering there might become the lord of knights and
+vassals, the counsellor of kings and princes.  Men may talk of
+democracy--those old monasteries were the most democratic
+institutions the world had ever till then seen.  'A man's a man for
+a' that,' was not only talked of in them, but carried out in
+practice--only not in anarchy, and as a cloak for licentiousness:
+but under those safeguards of strict discipline, and almost military
+order, without which men may call themselves free, and yet be really
+only slaves to their own passions.  Yes, paradoxical as it may seem,
+in those monasteries was preserved the sacred fire of modern liberty,
+through those feudal centuries when all the outside world was doing
+its best to trample it out.  Remember, as a single instance, that in
+the Abbot's lodging at Bury St. Edmunds, the Magna Charta was drawn
+out, before being presented to John at Runymede.  I know what they
+became afterwards, better than most do here; too well to defile my
+lips, or your ears, with tales too true.  They had done their work,
+and they went.  Like all things born in time, they died; and decayed
+in time; and the old order changed, giving place to the new; and God
+fulfilled himself in many ways.  But in them, too, he fulfilled
+himself.  They were the best things the world had seen; the only
+method of Christianizing and civilizing semi-barbarous Europe.  Like
+all human plans and conceptions, they contained in themselves
+original sin; idolatry, celibacy, inhuman fanaticism; these were
+their three roots of bitterness; and when they bore the natural fruit
+of immorality, the monasteries fell with a great and just
+destruction.  But had not those monasteries been good at first, and
+noble at first; had not the men in them been better and more useful
+men than the men outside, do you think they would have endured for
+centuries?  They would not even have established themselves at all.
+They would soon, in those stormy times, have been swept off the face
+of the earth.  Ill used they often were, plundered and burnt down.
+But men found that they were good.  Their own plunderers found that
+they could not do without them; and repented, and humbled themselves,
+and built them up again, to be centres of justice and mercy and
+peace, amid the wild weltering sea of war and misery.  For all things
+endure, even for a generation, only by virtue of the good which is in
+them.  By the Spirit of God in them they live, as do all created
+things; and when he taketh away their breath they die, and return
+again to their dust.
+
+And what was the original sin of them?  We can hardly say that it was
+their superstitious and partially false creed:  because that they
+held in common with all Europe.  It was rather that they had
+identified themselves with, and tried to realize on earth, one of the
+worst falsehoods of that creed--celibacy.  Not being founded on the
+true and only ground of all society, family life, they were merely
+artificial and self-willed arrangements of man's invention, which
+could not develop to any higher form.  And when the sanctity of
+marriage was revindicated at the Reformation, the monasteries, having
+identified themselves with celibacy, naturally fell.  They could not
+partake in the Reformation movement, and rise with it into some
+higher form of life, as the laity outside did.  I say, they were
+altogether artificial things.  The Abbot might be called the Abba,
+Father, of his monks:  but he was not their father--just as when
+young ladies now play at being nuns, they call their superior,
+Mother:  but all the calling in the world will not make that sacred
+name a fact and a reality, as they too often find out.
+
+And celibacy brought serious evils from the first.  It induced an
+excited, hysterical tone of mind, which is most remarkable in the
+best men; violent, querulous, suspicious, irritable, credulous,
+visionary; at best more womanly than manly; alternately in tears and
+in raptures.  You never get in their writings anything of that manly
+calmness, which we so deservedly honour, and at which we all aim for
+ourselves.  They are bombastic; excited; perpetually mistaking
+virulence for strength, putting us in mind for ever of the
+allocutions of the Popes.  Read the writings of one of the best of
+monks, and of men, who ever lived, the great St. Bernard, and you
+will be painfully struck by this hysterical element.  The fact is,
+that their rule of life, from the earliest to the latest,--from that
+of St. Benedict of Casino, 'father of all monks,' to that of Loyola
+the Jesuit, was pitched not too low, but too high.  It was an ideal
+which, for good or for evil, could only be carried out by new
+converts, by people in a state of high religious excitement, and
+therefore the history of the monastic orders is just that of the
+protestant sects.  We hear of continual fallings off from their first
+purity; of continual excitements, revivals, and startings of new
+orders, which hoped to realize the perfection which the old orders
+could not.  You must bear this in mind, as you read mediaeval
+history.  You will be puzzled to know why continual new rules and new
+orders sprung up.  They were so many revivals, so many purist
+attempts at new sects.  You will see this very clearly in the three
+great revivals which exercised such enormous influence on the history
+of the 13th, the 16th and the 17th centuries,--I mean the rise first
+of the Franciscans and Dominicans, next of the Jesuits, and lastly of
+the Port Royalists.  They each professed to restore monachism to what
+it had been at first; to realize the unnatural and impossible ideal.
+
+Another serious fault of these monasteries may be traced to their
+artificial celibate system.  I mean their avarice.  Only one
+generation after St. Sturmi, Charlemagne had to make indignant laws
+against Abbots who tried to get into their hands the property of
+everybody around them:  but in vain.  The Abbots became more and more
+the great landholders, till their power was intolerable.  The reasons
+are simple enough.  An abbey had no children between whom to divide
+its wealth, and therefore more land was always flowing in and
+concentrating, and never breaking up again; while almost every Abbot
+left his personalities, all his private savings and purchases, to his
+successor.
+
+Then again, in an unhappy hour, they discovered that the easiest way
+of getting rich was by persuading sinners, and weak persons, to
+secure the safety of their souls by leaving land to the Church, in
+return for the prayers and masses of monks; and that shameful mine of
+wealth was worked by them for centuries, in spite of statutes of
+mortmain, and other checks which the civil power laid on them, very
+often by most detestable means.  One is shocked to find good men
+lending themselves to such base tricks:  but we must recollect, that
+there has always been among men a public and a private conscience,
+and that these two, alas! have generally been very different.  It is
+an old saying, that 'committees have no consciences;' and it is too
+true.  A body of men acting in concert for a public purpose will do
+things which they would shrink from with disgust, if the same trick
+would merely put money into their private purses; and this is too
+often the case when the public object is a good one.  Then the end
+seems to sanctify the means, to almost any amount of chicanery.
+
+So it was with those old monks.  An abbey had no conscience.  An
+order of monks had no conscience.  A Benedictine, a Dominican, a
+Franciscan, who had not himself a penny in the world, and never
+intended to have one, would play tricks, lie, cheat, slander, forge,
+for the honour and the wealth of his order; when for himself, and in
+himself, he may have been an honest God-fearing man enough.  So it
+was; one more ugly fruit of an unnatural attempt to be not good men,
+but something more than men; by trying to be more than men, they
+ended by being less than men.  That was their sin, and that sin, when
+it had conceived, brought forth death.
+
+
+
+LECTURE X--THE LOMBARD LAWS
+
+
+
+I have tried to shew you how the Teutonic nations were Christianized.
+I have tried to explain to you why the clergy who converted them
+were, nevertheless, more or less permanently antagonistic to them.  I
+shall have, hereafter, to tell you something of one of the most
+famous instances of that antagonism:  of the destruction of the
+liberties of the Lombards by that Latin clergy.  But at first you
+ought to know something of the manners of these Lombards; and that
+you may learn best by studying their Code.
+
+They are valuable to you, as giving you a fair specimen of the laws
+of an old Teutonic people.  You may profitably compare them with the
+old Gothic, Franco-Salic, Burgundian, Anglo-Saxon, and Scandinavian
+laws, all formed on the same primaeval model, agreeing often in
+minute details, and betokening one primaeval origin, of awful
+antiquity.  By studying them, moreover, you may gain some notion of
+that primaeval liberty and self-government, common at first to all
+the race, but preserved alone by England;--to which the descendants
+of these very Lombards are at this very moment so manfully working
+their way back.
+
+These laws were collected and published in writing by king Rothar,
+A.D. 643, 76 years after Alboin came into Italy.  The cause, he says,
+was the continual wearying of the poor, and the superfluous
+exactions, and even violence, of the strong against those who were
+weak.  They are the 'laws of our fathers, as far as we have learnt
+them from ancient men, and are published with the counsel and consent
+of our princes, judges, and all our most prosperous army,' i.e. the
+barons, or freemen capable of bearing arms; 'and are confirmed
+according to the custom of our nation by garathinx,' that is, as far
+as I can ascertain from Grimm's German Law, by giving an earnest,
+garant, or warrant of the bargain.
+
+Among these Lombards, as among our English forefathers, when a man
+thingavit, i.e. donavit, a gift or bequest to any one, it was
+necessary, according to law CLXXII., to do it before gisiles,
+witnesses, and to give a garathinx, or earnest, of his bequest--a
+halm of straw, a turf, a cup of drink, a piece of money--as to this
+day a drover seals his bargain with a shilling, and a commercial
+traveller with a glass of liquor.  Whether Rothar gave the garathinx
+to his barons, or his barons to him, I do not understand:  but at
+least it is clear from the use of this one word that the publication
+of these laws was a 'social contract'--a distinct compact between
+king and people.  From all which you will perceive at once that these
+Lombards, like all Teutons, were a free people, under a rough kind of
+constitutional monarchy.  They would have greeted with laughter the
+modern fable of the divine right of kings, if by that they were
+expected to understand that the will of the king was law, or that the
+eldest son of a certain family had any God-given ipso-facto right to
+succeed his father.  Sixteen kings, says the preface, had reigned
+from Agilmund to Rothar; and seven times had the royal race been
+changed.  That the king should belong to one of the families who
+derived their pedigree from Wodin, and that a son should, as natural,
+succeed his father, were old rules:  but the barons would, as all
+history shews, make little of crowning a younger son instead of an
+elder, if the younger were a hero, and the elder an 'arga'--a lazy
+loon; and little, also, would they make of setting aside the whole
+royal family, and crowning the man who would do their business best.
+The king was, as this preface and these laws shew, the commander in
+chief of the exercitus, the militia, and therefore of every free man
+in the state; (for all were bound to fight when required).  He was
+also the supreme judge, the head of the executive, dispenser and
+fountain of law:  but with no more power of making the law, of
+breaking the law, or of arbitrarily depriving a man of his property,
+than an English sovereign has now; and his power was quamdiu se bene
+gesserit, and no longer, as history proves in every page.
+
+The doctrine of the divine right of kings as understood in England in
+the seventeenth century, and still in some continental countries,
+was, as far as I can ascertain, invented by the early popes, not for
+the purpose of exalting the kings, but of enslaving them, and through
+them the nations.  A king and his son's sons had divine 'right to
+govern wrong' not from God, but from the vicar of God and the
+successor of St. Peter, to whom God had given the dominion of the
+whole earth, and who had the right to anoint, or to depose,
+whomsoever he would.  Even in these old laws, we see that new idea
+obtruding itself.  'The king's heart,' says one of them 'is in the
+hand of God.'  That is a text of Scripture.  What it was meant to
+mean, one cannot doubt, or by whom it was inserted.  The
+'Chancellor,' or whoever else transcribed those laws in Latin, was,
+of course, a cleric, priest or monk.  From his hand comes the first
+hint of arbitrary power; the first small blot of a long dark stain of
+absolutism, which was to darken and deepen through centuries of
+tyranny and shame.
+
+But to plead the divine right of kings, in a country which has thrown
+off its allegiance to the pope, is to assert the conclusion of a
+syllogism, the major and minor premiss of which are both denied by
+the assertor.  The arguments for such a right drawn from the Old
+Testament, which were common among the high-church party from James
+I. to James II. and the Nonjurors, are really too inconsequent to
+require more than a passing smile.  How can you prove that a king has
+the power to make laws, from the history of the Jewish nation, when
+that very history represents it all through as bound by a primaeval
+and divinely revealed law, to which kings and people were alike
+subject?  How can you prove that the eldest son's eldest son has a
+divine right to wear the crown as 'God's anointed,' when the very
+persons to whom that title is given are generally either not eldest
+sons, or not of royal race at all?  The rule that the eldest son's
+eldest son should succeed, has been proved by experience to be in
+practice a most excellent one:  but it rests, as in England, so in
+Lombardy, or Spain, or Frankreich of old time, simply upon the
+consent of the barons, and the will of the thing or parliament.
+
+There is a sentimental admiration of 'Imperialism' growing up now-a-
+days, under the pretentious titles of 'hero-worship,' and 'strong
+government;' and the British constitution is represented as a clumsy
+and artificial arrangement of the year 1688.  1688 after Christ?
+1688 before Christ would be nearer the mark.  It is as old, in its
+essentials, as the time when not only all the Teutons formed one
+tribe, but when Teutons and Scandinavians were still united--and when
+that was, who dare say?  We at least brought the British constitution
+with us out of the bogs and moors of Jutland, along with our smock-
+frocks and leather gaiters, brown bills and stone axes; and it has
+done us good service, and will do, till we have carried it right
+round the world.
+
+As for these Lombard kings, they arose on this wise.  After Alboin's
+death the Lombards were for ten years under dukes, and evil times
+came, every man doing what was right in his own eyes; enlarging their
+frontier by killing the Roman landholders, and making the survivors
+give them up a portion of their lands, as Odoacer first, and the
+Ostrogoths next, had done.  At last, tired of lawlessness, dissension
+and weakness, and seemingly dreading an invasion from Childebert,
+king of the Franks, they chose a king, Autharis the son of Cleph, and
+called him Flavius, by which Roman title the Lombard kings were
+afterwards known.  Moreover, they agreed to give him (I conclude only
+once for all) the half of all their substance, to support the
+kingdom.  There were certain tributes afterwards paid into the king's
+treasury every three years; and certain fines, and also certain
+portions of the property of those who died without direct heirs, seem
+to have made up the revenue.  Whereon, Paul says, perfect peace and
+justice followed.
+
+Now for the laws, which were reduced into writing about sixty years
+afterwards.  The first thing that you will remark about these laws,
+is that duel, wager of battle under shield, 'diremptio causae per
+pugnam sub uno scuto,' is the earliest form of settling a lawsuit.
+If you cannot agree, fight it out fairly, either by yourself or per
+campionem, a champion or kemper man, and God defend the right.  Then
+follows 'faida,' blood-feud, from generation to generation.  To stop
+which a man is allowed to purge himself by oath; his own and that of
+certain neighbours, twelve in general, who will swear their belief in
+his innocence.  This was common to the northern nations, and was the
+origin of our trial by jury.  If guilty, the offender has to pay the
+weregeld, or legal price, set upon the injury he has inflicted.  When
+the composition is paid, there is an end of the feud; if after taking
+the composition the plaintiff avenges himself, he has to pay it back.
+Hence our system of fines.
+
+This method of composition by fines runs through all the Teutonic
+laws; and makes the punishment of death, at least among freemen, very
+rare.
+
+Punishments by stripes, by imprisonment, or by cruel or degrading
+methods, there are none.  The person of a freeman is sacred, 'Vincire
+et verberare nefas,' as Tacitus said of these Germans 600 years
+before.
+
+The offences absolutely punishable by death seem to be, treason
+against the king's life; cowardice in battle; concealment of robbers;
+mutinies and attempts to escape out of the realm; and therefore
+(under the then military organization) to escape from the duty of
+every freeman, to bear arms in defence of the land.
+
+More than a hundred of these laws define the different fines, or
+'weregelds,' by which each offence is to be compounded for, from 900
+solidi aurei, gold pieces, for a murder, downwards to the smallest
+breach of the peace.  Each limb has its special price.  For the loss
+of an eye, half the price of the whole man is to be paid.  A front
+tooth is worth 16s., solidi aurei; their loss being a disfigurement;
+but a back tooth is worth only 8s.  A slave's tooth, on the other
+hand, is worth but 4s.; and in every case, the weregeld of a slave is
+much less than that of a freeman.
+
+The sacredness of the household, and the strong sense of the
+individual rights of property, are to be remarked.  One found in a
+'court,' courtledge (or homestead), by night (as we say in old
+English), may be killed.  You know, I dare say, that in many Teutonic
+and Scandinavian nations the principle that a man's house is his
+castle was so strongly held that men were not allowed to enter a
+condemned man's house to carry him off to execution; but if he would
+not come out, could only burn the house over his head.  Shooting, or
+throwing a lance into any man's homestead, costs 20s.  'Oberos,' or
+'curtis ruptura,' that is, making violent entry into a man's
+homestead, costs 20s. also.  Nay, merely to fetch your own goods out
+of another man's house secretly, and without asking leave, was
+likewise punished as oberos.
+
+So of personal honour.  'Schelte' or insult, for instance, to call a
+man arga, i.e. a lazy loon, is a serious offence.  If the defendant
+will confess that he said it in a passion, and will take oath that he
+never knew the plaintiff to be arga, he must still pay 12s.; but if
+he will stand to his word, then he must fight it out by duel, sub uno
+scuto.
+
+The person, for the same reason, was sacred.  If a man had lain in
+wait for a freeman, 'cum virtute et solatio,' with valour and
+comfort, i.e. with armed men to back him, and had found him standing
+or walking simply, and had shamefully held him, or 'battiderit,'
+committed assault and battery on him, he must pay half the man's
+weregeld; the 'turpiter et ridiculum' being considered for a freeman
+as half as bad as death.  Here you find in private life, as well as
+in public, the vincire et verberare nefas.
+
+If, again, one had a mind to lose 80 shillings of gold, he need but
+to commit the offence of 'meerworphin,' a word which will puzzle you
+somewhat, till you find it to signify 'mare warping,' to warp, or
+throw one's neighbour off his mare or horse.
+
+A blow with the closed fist, again, costs three shillings:  but one
+with the open hand, six.  The latter is an insult as well as an
+injury.  A freeman is struck with the fist, but a slave with the palm
+of the hand.  Breaking a man's head costs six solidi.  But if one had
+broken his skull, then (as in the Alemannic laws) one must pay twelve
+shillings, and twelve more for each fracture up to three--after which
+they are not counted.  But a piece of bone must come out which will
+make a sound when thrown into a shield twelve feet off; which feet
+are to be measured by that of a man of middle stature.  From which
+strange law may be deduced, not only the toughness of the Lombard
+brain-pan, but the extreme necessity of defining each particular, in
+order to prevent subsequent disputes, followed up by a blood-feud,
+which might be handed down from father to son.  For by accepting the
+legal fine, the injured man expressly renounced his primaeval right
+of feud.
+
+Then follow some curious laws in favour of the masters of Como,
+Magistri Comacenes, who seem to have been a guild of architects,
+perhaps the original germ of the great society of free-masons--
+belonging, no doubt, to the Roman population--who were settled about
+the lake of Como, and were hired, on contract, (as the laws
+themselves express,) to build for the Lombards, who of course had no
+skill to make anything beyond a skin-tent or a log-hall.
+
+Then follow laws against incendiaries; a fine for damage by
+accidental house-fire, if the offender have carried fire more than
+nine feet from the hearth; a law against leaving a fire alight on a
+journey, as in the Australian colonies now.  Then laws to protect
+mills; important matters in those days, being unknown to the Lombards
+before their entrance into Italy.
+
+Then laws of inheritance; on which I shall remark, that natural sons,
+if free, are to have a portion of their father's inheritance; but
+less than the legitimate sons:  but that a natural son born of a
+slave remains a slave, 'nisi pater liberum thingaverit.'  This cruel
+law was the law of Rome and of the Church; our Anglo-Saxon
+forefathers, to their honour, held the reverse rule.  'Semper a
+patre, non a matre, generationis ordo texitur.'  Next, it is to be
+remarked, that no free woman can live in Lombardy, or, I believe, in
+any Teutonic state, save under the 'mundium' of some one.  You should
+understand this word 'mund.'  Among most of the Teutonic races,
+women, slaves, and youths, at least not of age to carry arms, were
+under the mund of some one.  Of course, primarily the father, head of
+the family, and if he died, an uncle, elder brother, &c.  The married
+woman was, of course, under the mund of her husband.  He was
+answerable for the good conduct of all under his mund; he had to pay
+their fines if they offended; and he was bound, on the other hand, to
+protect them by all lawful means.
+
+This system still lingers in the legal status of women in England,
+for good and evil; the husband is more or less answerable for the
+wife's debts; the wife, till lately, was unable to gain property
+apart from her husband's control; the wife is supposed, in certain
+cases of law, to act under the husband's compulsion.  All these, and
+many others, are relics of the old system of mund for women; and that
+system has, I verily believe, succeeded.  It has called out, as no
+other system could have done, chivalry in the man.  It has made him
+feel it a duty and an honour to protect the physically weaker sex.
+It has made the woman feel that her influence, whether in the state
+or in the family, is to be not physical and legal, but moral and
+spiritual; and that it therefore rests on a ground really nobler and
+deeper than that of the man.  The modern experiments for emancipating
+women from all mund, and placing them on a physical and legal
+equality with the man, may be right, and may be ultimately
+successful.  We must not hastily prejudge them.  But of this we may
+be almost certain; that if they succeed, they will cause a wide-
+spread revolution in society, of which the patent danger will be, the
+destruction of the feeling of chivalry, and the consequent
+brutalization of the male sex.
+
+Then follow laws relating to marriage and women, of which I may
+remark, that (as in Tacitus' time), the woman brings her dowry, or
+'fader fee,' to her husband; and that the morning after the wedding
+she receives from him, if he be content with her, her morgen gap, or
+morning gift; which remains her own private property, unless she
+misbehaves.
+
+The honour of women, whether in fact or merely in fame, is protected
+by many severe laws, among which I shall only notice, that the
+calling a free woman 'striga' (witch) is severely punishable.  If any
+one does so who has the mund of her, except her father or brother, he
+loses his mund.
+
+On the whole, woman's condition seems inferior to man's on some
+points:  but superior on others.  e.g. A woman's weregeld--the price
+of her life--is 1200 solidi; while the man's is only 900.  For he can
+defend himself, but she cannot.  On the other hand, if a man kill his
+wife, he pays only the 1200 solidi, and loses her dowry:  but if she
+kill him, she dies.
+
+Again.  If a free man be caught thieving, up to the amount of 20
+siliquae, beans, i.e. one gold piece--though Pope Gregory makes the
+solidus (aureus) 24 siliquae--he replaces the theft, and pays 80
+solidi, or dies; and a slave one half, or dies.
+
+But if a free woman is taken in theft, she only replaces it; for she
+has suffered for her wrong-doing, and must lay it to her own shame,
+that she has tried to do 'operam indecentem,' a foul deed.  And if an
+aldia or slave-woman steals, her master replaces the theft, and pays
+40 solidi, minus the value of the stolen goods--and beats her
+afterwards, I presume, if he chooses.
+
+And now concerning slaves, who seem to have been divided into three
+classes.
+
+The Aldius and Aldia, masculine and feminine, who were of a higher
+rank than other slaves.
+
+The Aldius could marry a free woman, while the slave marrying a free
+woman is punishable by death; and, as experimentum crucis, if an
+Aldius married an Aldia or a free woman, the children followed the
+father.  If he married a slave, the children followed the mother, and
+became slaves of his lord.
+
+The Aldius, again, may not sell his lord's land or slaves, which
+indicates that he held land and slaves under his lord.
+
+What the word means, Grimm does not seem to know.  He thinks it
+synonymous with 'litus,' of whom we hear as early as Tacitus' time,
+as one of the four classes, nobles, freemen, liti, slaves; and
+therefore libertus, a freedman.  But the word does not merely mean,
+it appears, a slave half freed by his master; but one rather
+hereditarily half free, and holding a farm under his lord.
+
+Dio, however, is said to be an old German word for a slave; and it is
+possible that aldius (a word only known, seemingly, in Lombardy) may
+have signified originally an old slave, an old Roman colonus, or
+peasant of some sort, found by the conquerors in possession of land,
+and allowed to retain, and till it, from father to son.  We, in
+England, had the same distinction between 'Laet,' or 'villains'
+settled on the land, glebae adscripti, and mere thralls or theows,
+slaves pure and simple.  No doubt such would have better terms than
+the mere mancipia--slaves taken in war, or bought--for the simple
+reason, that they would be agriculturists, practised in the Roman
+tillage, understanding the mysteries of irrigation, artificial
+grasses, and rotation of crops, as well as the culture of vines,
+fruit, and olives.
+
+Next to them you have different sorts of slaves; Servus massarius,
+who seems to be also rusticanus, one who takes care of his lord's
+'massa' or farm, and is allowed a peculium, it seems, some animals of
+his own, which he may not sell, though he may give them away.  And
+again, servus doctus, an educated household slave, whose weregeld is
+higher than that of others.
+
+The laws relating to fugitive slaves seem as merciful as such things
+can be; and the Lombards have always had the credit of being kind and
+easy masters.
+
+Connected with fugitive slaves are laws about portunarii, ferrymen,
+who appear, as you know, in the old ballads as very important, and
+generally formidable men.  The fight between Von Troneg Hagen and the
+old ferryman in the Nibelungen Lied, is a famous instance of the
+ancient ferrymen's prowess.  One can easily understand how necessary
+strict laws were, to prevent these ferrymen carrying over fugitive
+slaves, outlaws, and indeed any one without due caution; for each man
+was bound to remain in his own province, that he might be ready when
+called on for military service; and a traveller to foreign parts was
+looked on as a deserter from his liege-lord and country.
+
+Then follow a great number of laws, to me both amusing and
+instructive, as giving us some glimpse of the country life of those
+Lombards in the 8th century.
+
+Scattered in the vast woodlands and marshes lie small farms, enclosed
+by ditches and posts and rails, from which if you steal a rail, you
+are fined 1s., if you steal a post, 3s.  There were stake fences,
+which you must be careful in making, for if a horse stakes himself by
+leaping in, you pay nothing; but if he does so by leaping out, you
+pay the price of the horse.  Moreover, you must leave no sharp stakes
+standing out of the hedge; for if a man or beast wounds himself
+thereby in passing, you have to pay full weregeld.
+
+Walking over sown land, or sending a woman of your mundium to do so,
+in accordance with an ancient superstition, is a severe offence; so
+is injuring a vineyard, or taking more than tres uvae (bunches of
+grapes, I presume) from the vine.  Injuring landmarks cut on the
+trees (theclaturas and signaturas) or any other boundary mark, is
+severely punishable either in a slave, or in a freeman.
+
+In the vast woods range herds of swine, and in the pastures, horses,
+cared for by law; for to take a herd of swine or brood mares as
+pledge, without the king's leave, is punishable by death, or a fine
+of 900s.  Oxen or horses used to the yoke can be taken as pledge; but
+only by leave of the king, or of the schuldhais (local magistrate),
+on proof that the debtor has no other property; for by them he gets
+his living.  If, however, you find pigs routing in your enclosure,
+you may kill one, under certain restrictions, but not the 'sornpair,'
+sounder boar, who 'battit et vincit' all the other boars in the
+sounder (old English for herd).
+
+Rival swineherds, as is to be supposed, 'battidunt inter se,' and
+'scandalum faciunt,' often enough.  Whereon the law advises them to
+fight it out, and then settle the damage between them.
+
+Horses are cared for.  To ride another man's horse costs 2s.; to dock
+or crop him, eight-fold the damage; and so on of hurting another
+man's horse.  Moreover, if your neighbour's dog flies at you, you may
+hit him with a stick or little sword, and kill him, but if you throw
+a stone after him and kill him, you being then out of danger, you
+must give the master a new dog.
+
+Then there are quaint laws about hunting; and damage caused by wild
+beasts caught in snares or brought to bay.  A wounded stag belongs to
+the man who has wounded it for twenty-four hours:  but after that to
+anyone.  Tame deer, it is observable, are kept; and to kill a doe or
+fawn costs 6s., to kill a buck, 12s.  Tame hawks, cranes, and swans,
+if taken in snares, cost 6s.  But any man may take flying hawks out
+of his neighbour's wood, but not out of the Gaias Regis, the king's
+gehage, haies, hedges, or enclosed parks.
+
+And now, I have but one more law to mention--would God that it had
+been in force in later centuries -
+
+'Let no one presume to kill another man's aldia or ancilla, as a
+striga, witch, which is called masca; because it is not to be
+believed by Christian minds, that a woman can eat up a live man from
+within; and if any one does so he shall pay 60s. as her price, and
+for his fault, half to her master, and half to the king.'
+
+This last strange law forces on us a serious question, one which may
+have been suggesting itself to you throughout my lecture.  If these
+were the old Teutonic laws, this the old Teutonic liberty, the
+respect for man as man, for woman as woman, whence came the opposite
+element?  How is it that these liberties have been lost throughout
+almost all Europe?  How is it that a system of law prevailed over the
+whole continent, up to the French revolution, and prevails still in
+too many countries, the very opposite of all this?
+
+I am afraid that I must answer, Mainly through the influence of the
+Roman clergy during the middle age.
+
+The original difference of race between the clergy and the Teutonic
+conquerors, which I have already pointed out to you, had a curious
+effect, which lingers to this day.  It placed the Church in
+antagonism, more or less open, to the civil administration of
+justice.  The criminal was looked on by the priest rather as a
+sufferer to be delivered, than an offender to be punished.  All who
+are conversant with the lives of saints must recollect cases in which
+the saint performs even miracles on behalf of the condemned.
+Mediaeval tales are full of instances of the same feeling which
+prompted the Italian brigands, even in our own times, to carry a
+leaden saint's image in his hat as a safeguard.  In an old French
+fabliau, for instance, we read how a certain highway-robber was
+always careful to address his prayers to the Blessed Virgin, before
+going out to murder and steal; and found the practice pay him well.
+For when he was taken and hanged, our Lady put her 'mains blanches'
+under his feet, and supported him invisibly for a whole day, till the
+executioner, finding it impossible to kill him, was forced to let him
+retire peaceably into a monastery, where he lived and died devoutly.
+We may laugh at such fancies; or express, if we will, our abhorrence
+of their immorality:  but it will be more useful to examine into the
+causes which produced them.  They seem to have been twofold.  In the
+first place, the Church did not look on the Teutonic laws, whether
+Frank, Burgund, Goth or Lombard, as law at all.  Her law, whether
+ecclesiastical or civil, was formed on the Roman model; and by it
+alone she wished herself, and those who were under her protection, to
+be judged.  Next--and this count is altogether to her honour--law,
+such as it was, was too often administered, especially by the Franks,
+capriciously and brutally; while the servile population, always the
+great majority, can hardly be said to have been under the protection
+of law at all.  No one can read the pages of Fredegarius, or Gregory
+of Tours, without seeing that there must have been cases weekly, even
+daily, which called on the clergy, in the name of justice and
+humanity, to deliver if possible, the poor from him that spoiled him;
+which excused fully the rise of the right of sanctuary, and of
+benefit of clergy, afterwards so much abused; which made it a pious
+duty in prelates to work themselves into power at court, and there,
+as the 'Chancellors' of princes, try to get something like regular
+justice done; and naturally enough, to remodel the laws of each
+nation on the time-honoured and scientific Roman form.  Nevertheless,
+the antagonism of the Church to the national and secular law remained
+for centuries.  It died out first perhaps, in England, after the
+signature of Magna Charta.  For then the English prelates began to
+take up that truly Protestant and national attitude which issued in
+the great Reformation:  but it lingers still in Ireland and in Italy.
+It lingered in France up to the French revolution, as may be seen
+notably in the account of the execution of the Marquise de
+Brinvilliers, by the priest who attended her.  Horror at her
+atrocious crimes is quite swallowed up, in the mind of the good
+father, by sympathy with her suffering; and the mob snatch her bones
+from the funeral pile, and keep them as the relics of a saint.
+
+But more.  While the Roman clergy did real good to Europe, in
+preserving the scientific elements of Roman law, they did harm by
+preserving therewith other elements--Roman chicane, and Roman
+cruelty.  In that respect, as in others, 'Rome conquered her
+conquerors;' and the descendants of those Roman lawyers, whom the
+honest Teutons called adders, and as adders killed them down,
+destroyed, in course of time, Teutonic freedom.
+
+But those descendants were, alas! the clergy.  Weak, they began early
+to adopt those arms of quibbling and craft, which religious men too
+often fancy are the proper arms of 'the saints' against 'the world.'
+Holding human nature in suspicion and contempt, they early gave way
+to the maxim of the savage, that every one is likely to be guilty
+till proved innocent, and therefore licensed the stupid brutalities
+of torture to extract confession.  Holding self-degradation to be a
+virtue, and independence as a carnal vice; glorying in being slaves
+themselves, till to become, under the name of holy obedience,
+'perinde ac cadaver,' was the ideal of a good monk; and accustomed,
+themselves, to degrading corporal punishment; they did not shrink
+from inflicting, even on boys and women, tortures as dastardly as
+indecent.  Looking on the world, and on the future of the human race,
+through a medium compared with which the darkest fancies of a modern
+fanatic are bright and clear, they did not shrink from inflicting
+penalties, the very mention of which makes the blood run cold.
+Suspecting, if not alternately envying and despising, all women who
+were not nuns; writing openly of the whole sex (until unsexed) as the
+snare and curse of mankind; and possessed by a Manichaean belief in
+the power and presence of innumerable demons, whose especial victims
+were women; they erected witch-hunting into a science; they pandered
+to, and actually formalized, and justified on scientific grounds, the
+most cruel and cowardly superstitions of the mob; and again and again
+raised literal crusades against women, torturing, exposing, burning,
+young and old, not merely in the witch-mania of the 17th century, but
+through the whole middle age.  It is a detestable page of history.  I
+ask those who may think my statement exaggerated, to consult the
+original authorities.  Let them contrast Rothar's law about the
+impossibility of witchcraft, with the pages of the Malleus
+Maleficarum, Nider's Fornicarium, or Delrio the Jesuit, and see for
+themselves who were the false teachers.  And if they be told, that
+the cruelties of the Inquisition were only those in vogue according
+to the secular law of the day, let them recollect that the
+formulizers of that law were none other than the celibate Roman
+clergy.
+
+I do not deny that there was in all this a just, though a terrible,
+Nemesis.  What was the essential fault of these Lombard laws--indeed
+of all the Teutonic codes?  This--that there was one law for the free
+man, another for the slave.  Ecclesiastical dominion was necessary,
+to make one law for all classes, even though it were a law of common
+slavery.  As the free had done to the slave, even so, and far worse,
+would the Roman clergy do to them.  The Albigense persecutors,
+burning sixty ladies in one day; Conrad of Marpurg scourging his own
+sovereign, St. Elizabeth; shaving the Count of Saiym's head; and
+burning noble ladies almost without trial; Sprenger and his compeers,
+offering up female hecatombs of the highest blood thoughout Germany;
+English bishops burning in Smithfield Anne Askew, the hapless court-
+beauty, and her fellow-courtier Mr. Lascelles, just as if they had
+been Essex or Berkshire peasants;--all these evildoers were welding
+the different classes of the European nations, by a community of
+suffering, into nations; into the belief that free and slave had one
+blood, one humanity, one conscience, one capacity of suffering; and
+at last, one capacity of rebelling, and making common cause, high and
+low alike, against him who reigned in Italy under the 'Romani nominis
+umbram.'
+
+And if our English law, our English ideas of justice and mercy, have
+retained, more than most European codes, the freedom, the
+truthfulness, the kindliness, of the old Teutonic laws, we owe it to
+the fact, that England escaped, more than any other land, the taint
+of effete Roman civilization; that she therefore first of the lands,
+in the 12th century, rebelled against, and first of them, in the 16th
+century, threw off, the Ultramontane yoke.
+
+And surely it will be so, in due time, with the descendants of these
+very Lombards.  We have seen them in these very years arise out of
+the dust and shame of centuries, and determine to be Lombards once
+again.  We have seen a hero arise among them of the true old Teuton
+stamp, bearing worthily the name which his forefathers brought over
+the Alps with Alboin--Garibald, the 'bold in war.'  May they succeed
+in the same noble struggle as that in which we succeeded, and
+returning, not in letter, but in spirit, to the old laws of Rothar
+and their free forefathers, become the leading race of a free and
+united Italy!
+
+
+
+LECTURE XI--THE POPES AND THE LOMBARDS
+
+
+
+'Our Lady the Mother of God, even Virgin Maria, together with us,
+protests to you, adjuring you with great obligations, and admonishes
+and commands you, and with her the thrones, dominations, all the
+heavenly angels, the martyrs and confessors of Christ, on behalf of
+the Roman city, committed to us by the Lord God, and the sheep of the
+Lord dwelling in it.  Defend and free it speedily from the hands of
+the persecuting Lombards, lest my body which suffered torments for
+Christ, and my home in which it rests by the command of God, be
+contaminated by the people of the Lombards, who are guilty of such
+iniquitous perjury, and are proud transgressors of the divine
+scripture.  So will I at the day of judgment reward you with my
+patronage, and prepare for you in the kingdom of God most shining and
+glorious tabernacles, promising you the reward of eternal
+retribution, and the infinite joys of paradise.
+
+'Run, by the true and living God I exhort you, run, and help; before
+the living fountain, whence you were consecrated and born again,
+shall dry up:  before the little spark remaining of that brilliant
+flame, from which you knew the light, be extinguished; before your
+spiritual mother, the holy Church of God, in which you hope to
+receive eternal life, shall be humiliated, invaded, violated, and
+defiled by the impious.
+
+'But if not, may your provinces in return, and your possessions, be
+invaded by people whom you know not.  Separate not yourselves from my
+Roman people; so you will not be aliens, and separate from the
+kingdom of God, and eternal life.  For whatever you shall ask of me,
+I will surely give you, and be your patron.  Assist my Roman people,
+your brothers; and strive more perfectly; for it is written, No man
+receiveth the crown, unless he strive lawfully.
+
+'I conjure you, most beloved, by the living God, leave not this my
+city of Rome to be any longer torn by the Lombards, lest your bodies
+and souls be torn and tormented for ever, in inextinguishable and
+Tartarian fire with the devil and his pestiferous angels; and let not
+the sheep of the Lord's flock, which are the Roman people, be
+dispersed any more, lest the Lord disperse you, and cast you forth as
+the people of Israel was dispersed.'
+
+You will conclude, doubtless, that this curious document can be
+nothing but a papal allocution.  Its peculiar scriptural style
+(wrongly supposed to have been invented by the Puritans, who merely
+learnt it from the old Roman clergy), as well as the self-conceit,
+which fancies the fate of the whole world to depend on the prosperity
+of a small half-ruined city in Italy, will be to you sufficient marks
+of the Roman hand.  But you will be somewhat mistaken.  It is hardly
+an epistle from the successor of St. Peter.  It professes to be an
+epistle from St. Peter himself, and sent by him through the hands of
+Pope Stephen III. to Pepin the king of the Franks, in the year 755.
+You will have concluded also from it, that Catholic Christianity is
+in its extreme agony; that the worship and name of our Lord, and the
+fountains of sacramental grace are about to be extinguished for ever,
+and that nothing but heresy or heathendom can follow.  Then you will
+be quite mistaken.  These Lombards are pious Catholics.  Builders of
+churches and monasteries, they are taking up the relics of the Roman
+martyrs, to transfer them to the churches of Milan and Pavia.  They
+have just given Pope Stephen the most striking proof of their awe of
+his person and office.  But they are quarrelling with him about the
+boundaries of his estates for the patrimony of St. Peter.  They
+consider that he and his predecessors have grossly wronged them at
+different times; and now last of all, by calling in foreign invaders;
+and they are at the gates of Rome laying waste the country, and
+demanding a poll-tax as ransom.  That is all.
+
+The causes which led to this quarrel must be sought far back in
+history.  The original documents in which you will find the facts
+will be Paulus Diaconus, as far as King Luitprand's death; then the
+Life and Writings of Gregory the Great; and then Baronius' Annals,
+especially his quotations from Anastasius' Life of Stephen III.,
+bearing in mind that, as with the Ostrogoths, we have only the Roman
+Papal story; that the Lombards have never stated their case, not even
+through Paulus Diaconus, who, being a clergyman, prudently holds his
+tongue about the whole matter.  But by far the best account is to be
+found in Dean Milman's 'Latin Christianity,' Vols.  I. and II.  Rome,
+you must understand, has become gradually the patrimony of St. Peter;
+the Popes are the practical kings of Rome, possessing, in the name of
+the Church, much land round Rome, and many estates scattered
+throughout Italy, and even in Sicily, Gaul, Africa, and the East--
+estates probably bequeathed by pious people.  They have succeeded to
+this jurisdiction simply by default.  They rule Rome, because there
+is no one else to rule it.  We find St. Gregory the Great feeding the
+pauper-masses of Rome, on the first day of every month, from the
+fruitful corn-bearing estates in Sicily; keeping up the 'Panem;' but
+substituting, thank Heaven, for the 'Circenses' at least the services
+of the Church.  Of course, the man who could keep the Roman people
+alive must needs become, ipso facto, their monarch.
+
+The Pope acknowledges, of course, a certain allegiance to the Emperor
+at Constantinople, and therefore to his representative, the Exarch of
+Ravenna:  that is to say, he meets them with flattery when they are
+working on his side; with wrath when they oppose him.  He intrigues
+with them, too, whenever he can safely do so, against the Lombards.
+
+Thus the Pope has become, during the four centuries which followed
+the destruction of the Western Empire, the sole surviving
+representative of that Empire.  He is the head of the 'gens togata;'
+of the 'Senatus Populusque Romanus.'  In him Rome has risen again out
+of her grave, to awe the peoples once more by the Romani nominis
+umbra; and to found a new Empire; not as before, on physical force,
+and the awe of visible power; but on the deeper and more enduring
+ground of spiritual force, and the awe of the invisible world.
+
+An Empire, I say.  The Popes were becoming, from the 5th to the 8th
+centuries, not merely the lords of Rome, but the lords of the Western
+Church.  Their spiritual Empire, to do them justice, was not so much
+deliberately sought by them, as thrust upon them.  As the clergy
+were, all over the Empire, the representatives of the down-trodden
+Romans, so they naturally gravitated toward the Eternal City, their
+ancient mistress.  Like all disciplined and organized bodies they
+felt the need of unity, of monarchy.  Where could they find it, save
+at Rome?  Rome was still, practically and in fact, the fountain of
+their doctrine, of their superior civilization; and to submit
+themselves to the Pope of Rome was their only means of keeping up one
+faith, one practice, and the strength which comes from union.
+
+To seat the Pope upon the throne of the Caesars; to attribute to him
+powers weightier than all which the Caesars had possest . . . It was
+a magnificent idea.  A politic idea, too; for it would cover the
+priesthood with all the prestige of ancient Rome, and enable them to
+face the barbarian in the name of that great people whose very memory
+still awed him; whose baths, aqueducts, palaces, he looked on as the
+work of demons; whose sages and poets were to him enchanters; whose
+very gems, dug out of the ruins by night, in fear and trembling,
+possest magic influence for healing, for preservation, for good
+fortune in peace or war.
+
+Politic; and in their eyes, true.  Easy enough to be believed
+honestly, by men who already believed honestly in their own divine
+mission.  They were the representatives of Christ on earth.  Of that
+fact there could be then, or can be now, no doubt whatsoever.
+Whatsoever truth, light, righteousness, there was in the West, came
+to it through them.  And Christ was the King of kings.  But He
+delayed his coming:  at moments, He seemed to have deserted the
+earth, and left mankind to tear itself in pieces, with wild war and
+misrule.  But it could not be so.  If Christ were absent, He must at
+least have left an authority behind Him to occupy till He came; a
+head and ruler for his opprest and distracted Church.  And who could
+that be, if not the Pope of Rome?
+
+It ought to be so.--It must be so--thought they.  And to men in that
+mood, proofs that it was so soon came to hand, and accumulated from
+generation to generation; till the Pope at last found himself
+proclaiming, and what was more, believing, that God had given the
+whole world to St. Peter, and through St. Peter to him; and that he
+was the only source of power, law, kingship, who could set up and
+pull down whom he would, as the vicegerent of God on earth.
+
+Such pretensions, of course, grew but slowly.  It was not, I believe,
+till the year 875, 180 years after the time of which I am speaking,
+that Pope John VIII. distinctly asserted his right, as representative
+of the ancient Roman Empire, to create the Caesar; and informed the
+Synod of Pavia that he had 'elected and approved Charles the Bald,
+with the consent of his brothers the bishops, of the other ministers
+of the Holy Roman Church, and' (significant, though empty words) 'of
+the Roman senate and people.'
+
+At the time of which I speak, the power was still in embryo, growing,
+through many struggles:  but growing surely and strongly, and
+destined speedily to avenge the fall of Rome on the simple barbarians
+who were tearing each other to pieces over her spoils.
+
+It is not easy to explain the lasting and hereditary hatred of the
+Popes to the Lombards.  Its origin is simple enough:  but not so its
+continuance.  Why they should be nefandissimi in the eyes of Pope
+Gregory the Great one sees:  but why 100 years afterwards, they
+should be still nefandissimi, and 'non dicenda gens Langobardorum,'
+not to be called a nation, is puzzling.
+
+At first, of course, the Pope could only look on them as a fresh
+horde of barbarous conquerors; half heathen, half Arian.  Their
+virtuous and loyal life within the boundaries of Alboin's conquests--
+of which Paulus Diaconus says, that violence and treachery were
+unknown--that no one oppressed, no one plundered--that the traveller
+went where he would in perfect safety--all this would be hid from the
+Pope by the plain fact, that they were continually enlarging their
+frontier toward Rome; that they had founded two half-independent
+Dukedoms of Beneventum and Spoleto, that Autharis had swept over
+South Italy, and ridden his horse into the sea at Reggio, to strike
+with his lance a column in the waves, and cry, 'Here ends the Lombard
+kingdom.'
+
+The Pope (Gregory the Great I am speaking of) could only recollect,
+again, that during the lawless interregnum before Autharis'
+coronation, the independent Lombard dukes had plundered churches and
+monasteries, slain the clergy, and destroyed the people, who had
+'grown up again like corn.'
+
+But as years rolled on, these Arian Lombards had become good
+Catholics; and that in the lifetime of Gregory the Great.
+
+Theodelinda, the Bavarian princess, she to whom Autharis had gone in
+disguise to her father's court, and only confessed himself at his
+departure, by rising in his stirrups, and burying his battle-axe in a
+tree stem with the cry, 'Thus smites Autharis the Lombard,'--this
+Theodelinda, I say, had married after his death Agilwulf his cousin,
+and made him king of the Lombards.
+
+She was a Catholic; and through her Gregory the Great converted
+Autharis, and the Lombard nation.  To her he addressed those famous
+dialogues of his, full alike of true piety and earnestness, and of
+childish superstition.  But in judging them and him we must bear in
+mind, that these Lombards became at least by his means Catholics, and
+that Arians would have believed in the superstitions just as much as
+Catholics.  And it is surely better to believe a great truth, plus
+certain mistakes which do not affect it in the least, than a great
+lie, plus the very same mistakes likewise.  Which is best, to believe
+that the road to London lies through Bishopstortford, and that there
+are dog-headed men on the road:  or that it lies through Edinburgh,
+but that there are dog-headed men on that road too?
+
+Theodelinda had built at Modicaea, twelve miles above Milan, a fair
+basilica to John the Baptist, enriched by her and the Lombard kings
+and dukes, 'crowns, crosses, golden tables adorned with emeralds,
+hyacinths, amber, carbuncles and pearls, gold and silver altar-
+cloths, and that admirable cup of sapphire,' all which remained till
+the eighteenth century.  There, too, was the famous iron crown of
+Lombardy, which Austria still claims as her own; so called from a
+thin ring of iron inserted in it, made from a nail of the true cross
+which Gregory had sent Agilwulf; just as he sent Childebert, the
+Frankish king, some filings of St. Peter's chains; which however, he
+says, did not always allow their sacred selves to be filed.
+
+In return, Agilwulf had restored the church-property which he had
+plundered, had reinstated the bishops; and why did not all go well?
+Why are these Lombards still the most wicked of men?
+
+Again, in the beginning of the eighth century came the days of the
+good Luitprand, 'wise and pious, a lover of peace, and mighty in war;
+merciful to offenders, chaste and modest, instant in prayer,
+bountiful in alms, equal to the philosophers, though he knew no
+letters, a nourisher of his people, an augmenter of the laws.'  He it
+was, who, when he had quarrelled with Pope Gregory II., and marched
+on Rome, was stopped at the Gates of the Vatican by the Pontiff's
+prayers and threats.  And a sacred awe fell on him; and humbly
+entering St. Peter's, he worshipped there, and laid on the Apostle's
+tomb his royal arms, his silver cross and crown of gold, and
+withdrawing his army, went home again in peace.  But why were this
+great king's good deeds towards the Pope and the Catholic faith
+rewarded, by what we can only call detestable intrigue and treachery?
+
+Again; Leo the Iconoclast Emperor destroyed the holy images in the
+East, and sent commands to the Exarch of Ravenna to destroy them in
+western Italy.  Pope Gregory II. replied by renouncing allegiance to
+the Emperor of Constantinople; and by two famous letters which are
+still preserved; in which he tells the Iconoclast Emperor, that, 'if
+he went round the grammar-schools at Rome, the children would throw
+their horn-books at his head . . . that he implored Christ to send
+the Emperor a devil, for the destruction of his body and the
+salvation of his soul . . . that if he attempted to destroy the
+images in Rome, the pontiff would take refuge with the Lombards, and
+then he might as well chase the wind that the Popes were the
+mediators of peace between East and West, and that the eyes of the
+nations were fixed on the Pope's humility, and adored as a God on
+earth the apostle St. Peter.  And that the pious Barbarians, kindled
+into rage, thirsted to avenge the persecution of the East.'  Then
+Luitprand took up the cause of the Pope and his images, and of the
+mob, who were furious at the loss of their idols; and marched on
+Ravenna, which opened her gates to him, so that he became master of
+the whole Pentapolis; and image-worship, to which some plainspoken
+people give a harsher name, was saved for ever and a day in Italy.
+Why did Gregory II. in return, call in Orso, the first Venetian Doge,
+to expel from Ravenna the very Luitprand who had fought his battles
+for him, and to restore that Exarchate of Ravenna, of which it was
+confessed, that its civil quarrels, misrule, and extortions, made it
+the most miserable government in Italy?  And why did he enter into
+secret negotiations with the Franks to come and invade Italy?
+
+Again, when Luitprand wanted to reduce the duchies of Beneventum and
+Spoleto, which he considered as rebels against him, their feudal
+suzerain; why did the next Pope, Gregory III., again send over the
+Alps to Charles Martel to come and invade Italy, and deliver the
+Church and Christ's people from ruin?
+
+And who were these Franks, the ancestors of that magnificent, but
+profligate aristocracy whose destruction our grandfathers beheld in
+1793?  I have purposely abstained from describing them, till they
+appear upon the stage of Italy, and take part in her fortunes--which
+were then the fortunes of the world.
+
+They appear first on the Roman frontier in A.D. 241, and from that
+time are never at rest till they have conquered the north of Gaul.
+They are supposed (with reason) not to have been a race or tribe at
+all; but a confederation of warriors, who were simply 'Franken,'
+'free;' 'free companions,' or 'free lances,' as they would have been
+called a few centuries later; who recruited themselves from any and
+every tribe who would join them in war and plunder.  If this was the
+case; if they had thrown away, as adventurers, much of the old
+Teutonic respect for law, for the royal races, for family life, for
+the sacred bonds of kindred, many of their peculiarities are
+explained.  Falsehood, brutality, lawlessness, ignorance, and cruelty
+to the conquered Romans, were their special sins; while their
+special, and indeed only virtue, was that indomitable daring which
+they transmitted to their descendants for so many hundred years.  The
+buccaneers of the young world, they were insensible to all influences
+save that of superstition.  They had become, under Clovis, orthodox
+Christians:  but their conversion, to judge from the notorious facts
+of history, worked little improvement on their morals.  The pages of
+Gregory of Tours are comparable, for dreary monotony of horrors, only
+to those of Johnson's History of the Pyrates.
+
+But, as M. Sismondi well remarks, their very ignorance and brutality
+made them the more easily the tools of the Roman clergy:  'Cette
+haute veneration pour l'Eglise, et leur severe orthodoxie, d'autant
+plus facile a conserver que, ne faisant aucune etude, et ne disputant
+jamais sur la foi, ils ne connaissaient pas meme les questions
+controversees, leur donnerent dans le clerge de puissants
+auxiliaires.  Les Francs se montrerent disposes a hair les Ariens, a
+les combattres, et les depouiller sans les entendre; les eveques, en
+retour, ne se montrerent pas scrupuleux sur le reste des
+enseignements moraux de la religion:  ils fermerent les yeux sur les
+violences, le meurtre, le dereglement des moeurs; ils autoriserent en
+quelque sorte publiquement la poligamie, et ils precherent le droit
+divin des rois et le devoir le l'obeissance pour les peuples {p279}.'
+
+A painful picture of the alliance:  but, I fear, too true.
+
+The history of these Franks you must read for yourselves.  You will
+find it well told in the pages of Sismondi, and in Mr. Perry's
+excellent book, 'The Franks.'  It suffices now to say, that in the
+days of Luitprand these Franks, after centuries of confusion and
+bloodshed, have been united into one great nation, stretching from
+the Rhine to the Loire and the sea, and encroaching continually to
+the southward and eastward.  The government has long passed out of
+the hands of their faineant Meerwing kings into that of the semi-
+hereditary Majores Domus, or Mayors of the Palace; and Charles
+Martel, perhaps the greatest of that race of great men, has just made
+himself mayor of Austrasia (the real Teutonic centre of Frank life
+and power), Neustria and Burgundy.  He has crushed Eudo, the duke of
+Romanized Aquitaine, and has finally delivered France and Christendom
+from the invading Saracens.  On his Franks, and on the Lombards of
+Italy, rest, for the moment, the destinies of Europe.
+
+For meanwhile another portent has appeared, this time out of the far
+East.  Another swarm of destroyers has swept over the earth.  The
+wild Arabs of the desert, awakening into sudden life and civilization
+under the influence of a new creed, have overwhelmed the whole East,
+the whole north of Africa, destroying the last relics of Roman and
+Greek civilization, and with them the effete and semi-idolatrous
+Christianity of the Empire.  All the work of Narses and Belisarius is
+undone.  Arab Emirs rule in the old kingdom of the Vandals.  The new
+human deluge has crossed the Straits into Europe.  The Visigoths,
+enervated by the luxurious climate of Spain, have recoiled before the
+Mussulman invaders.  Roderick, the last king of the Goths, is
+wandering as an unknown penitent in expiation of his sin against the
+fair Cava, which brought down (so legends and ballads tell) the
+scourge of God upon the hapless land; and the remnants of the old
+Visigoths and Sueves are crushed together into the mountain
+fastnesses of Asturias and Gallicia, thence to reissue, after long
+centuries, as the noble Spanish nation, wrought in the forges of
+adversity into the likeness of tempered steel; and destined to
+reconquer, foot by foot, their native land from the Moslem invader.
+
+But at present the Crescent was master of the Cross; and beyond the
+Pyrenees all was slavery and 'miscreance.'  The Arabs, invading
+France in 732, in countless thousands, had been driven back at the
+great fight of Tours, with a slaughter so great, that the excited
+imagination of Paulus Diaconus sees 375,000 miscreants dead upon the
+field, while only 1500 Franks had perished.  But home troubles had
+prevented 'the Hammer of the Moors' from following up his victory.
+The Saracens had returned in force in 737, and again in 739.  They
+still held Narbonne.  The danger was imminent.  There was no reason
+why they should not attempt a third invasion.  Why should they not
+spread along the shores of the Mediterranean, establishing themselves
+there, as they were already doing in Sicily, and menacing Rome from
+north as well as south?  To unite, therefore, the two great Catholic
+Teutonic powers, the Frank and the Lombard, for the defence of
+Christendom, should have been the policy of him who called himself
+the Chief Pontiff in Christendom.  Yet the Pope preferred, in the
+face of that great danger, to set the Teutonic nations on destroying
+each other, rather than to unite them against the Moslem.
+
+The bribe offered to the Frank was significant--the title of Roman
+Consul; beside which he was to have filings of St. Peter's chains,
+and the key of his tomb, to preserve him body and soul from all evil.
+
+Charles would not come.  Frank though he was, he was too honourable
+to march at a priest's bidding against Luitprand, his old brother in
+arms, to whom he had sent the boy Pepin, his son, that Luitprand
+might take him on his knee, and cut his long royal hair, and become
+his father-in-arms, after the good old Teuton fashion; Luitprand, who
+with his Lombards had helped him to save Christendom a second time
+from the Mussulman in 737.  The Pope, one would think, should have
+remembered that good deed of the good Lombard's whereof his epitaph
+sings,
+
+
+      'Deinceps tremuere feroces
+Usque Saraceni, quos dispulit impiger, ipsos
+Cum premerent Gallos, Karolo poscente juvari.'
+
+
+So Charles Martel took the title of Patrician from the Pope, but sent
+him no armies; and the quarrel went on; while Charles filled up the
+measure of his iniquity by meddling with that church-property in Gaul
+which his sword had saved from the hordes of the Saracens; and is
+now, as St. Eucherius (or Bishop Hincmar) saw in a vision, writhing
+therefore in the lowest abyss of hell.
+
+So one generation more passes by; and then Pepin le Bref, grown to
+manhood, is less scrupulous than his father.  He is bound to the Pope
+by gratitude.  The Pope has confirmed him as king, allowing him to
+depose the royal house of the Merovingians, and so assumed the right
+of making kings.--A right which future popes will not forget.
+
+Meanwhile the Pope has persuaded the Lombard king Rachis to go into a
+monastery.  Astulf seizes the crown, and attacks Ravenna.  The Pope
+succeeding, Stephen III., opposes him; and he marches on Rome,
+threatening to assault it, unless the citizens redeem their lives by
+a poll-tax.
+
+Stephen determines to go himself to Pepin to ask for help:  and so
+awful has the name and person of a Pope become, that he is allowed to
+do it; allowed to pass safely and unarmed through the very land upon
+which he is going to let loose all the horrors of invading warfare.
+
+It is a strange, and instructive figure, that.  The dread of the
+unseen, the fear of spiritual power, has fallen on the wild Teutons;
+on Frank and on Lombard alike.  The Pope and his clergy are to them
+magicians, against whom neither sword nor lance avails; who can heal
+the sick and blast the sound; who can call to their aid out of the
+clouds that pantheon of demi-gods, with which, under the name of
+saints, they have peopled heaven; who can let loose on them the
+legions of fiends who dwell in every cave, every forest, every ruin,
+every cloud; who can, by the sentence of excommunication, destroy
+both body and soul in hell.  They were very loth to fear God, these
+wild Teutons; therefore they had instead, as all men have who will
+not fear God, to fear the devil.
+
+So Pope Stephen goes to Pepin, the eldest son of the Church.  He
+promises to come with all his Franks.  Stephen's conscience seems to
+have been touched:  he tries to have no fighting, only negotiation:
+but it is too late now.  Astolf will hear of no terms; Pepin sweeps
+over the Alps, and at the gates of Pavia dictates his own terms to
+the Lombards.  The old Lombard spirit seems to have past away.
+
+Pepin goes back again, and Astolf refuses to fulfil his promises.
+The Pope sends Pepin that letter from St. Peter himself with which
+this lecture commenced.
+
+Astolf has marched down, as we heard, to the walls of Rome, laying
+the land waste; cutting down the vines, carrying off consecrated
+vessels, insulting the sacrament of the altar.  The Lombards have
+violated nuns; and tried to kill them, the Pope says; though, if they
+had really tried, one cannot see why they should not have succeeded.
+In fact, Pope Stephen's hysterical orations to Pepin must be received
+with extreme caution.  No Catholic historian of that age cares to
+examine the truth of a fact which makes for him; nothing is too bad
+to say of an enemy:  and really the man who would forge a letter from
+St. Peter might dare to tell a few lesser falsehoods into the
+bargain.  Pepin cannot but obey so august a summons; and again he is
+in Italy, and the Lombards dare not resist him.  He seizes not only
+all that Astolf had taken from the Pope, but the Pentapolis and
+Exarchate, the property, if of any one, of the Greek Emperors, and
+bestows them on Stephen, the Pope, and 'the holy Roman Republic.'
+
+The pope's commissioners received the keys of the towns, which were
+placed upon the altar of St. Peter; and this, the Dotation of Pepin,
+the Dotation of the Exarchate, was the first legal temporal
+sovereignty of the Popes: --born in sin, and conceived in iniquity,
+as you may see.
+
+The Lombard rule now broke up rapidly.  The Lombards of Spoleto
+yielded to the double pressure of Franks and Romans, asked to be
+'taken into the service of St. Peter,' and clipt their long German
+locks after the Roman fashion.
+
+Charlemagne, in his final invasion, had little left to do.  He
+confirmed Pepin's gift, and even, though he hardly kept his promise,
+enlarged it to include the whole of Italy, from Lombardy to the
+frontier of Naples, while he himself became king of Lombardy, and won
+the iron crown.
+
+And so by French armies--not for the last time--was the Pope propt up
+on his ill-gotten throne.
+
+But the mere support of French armies was not enough to seat the Pope
+securely upon the throne of the western Caesars.  Documentary
+evidence was required to prove that they possessed Rome, not as the
+vassals of the Frankish Kaisers, or of any barbarian Teutons
+whatsoever; but in their own right, as hereditary sovereigns of Rome.
+And the documents, when needed, were forthcoming.  Under the name of
+St. Isidore, some ready scribe produced the too-famous 'Decretals,'
+and the 'Donation of Constantine,' and Pope Adrian I. saw no reason
+against publishing them to Charlemagne and to the world.
+
+It was discovered suddenly, by means of these remarkable documents,
+that Constantine the Great had been healed of leprosy, and afterwards
+baptized, by Pope Sylvester; that he had, in gratitude for his cure,
+resigned to the Popes his western throne, and the patrimony of St.
+Peter, and the sovereignty of Italy and the West; and that this was
+the true reason of his having founded Constantinople, as a new seat
+of government for the remnant of his empire.
+
+This astounding falsehood was, of course, accepted humbly by the
+unlettered Teutons; and did its work well, for centuries to come.  It
+is said--I trust not truly--to be still enrolled among the decrees of
+the Canon law, though reprobated by all enlightened Roman Catholics.
+Be that as it may, on the strength of this document the Popes began
+to assume an all but despotic sovereignty over the western world,
+and--the Teutonic peoples, and Rome's conquest of her conquerors was
+at last complete.
+
+What then were the causes of the Papal hatred of a race who were good
+and devout Catholics for the last 200 years of their rule?
+
+There were deep political reasons (in the strictest, and I am afraid
+lowest sense of the word); but over and above them there were
+evidently moral reasons, which lay even deeper still.
+
+A free, plain-spoken, practical race like these Lombards; living by
+their own laws; disbelieving in witchcraft; and seemingly doing
+little for monasticism, were not likely to find favour in the eyes of
+popes.  They were not the material which the Papacy could mould into
+the Neapolitan ideal of 'Little saints,--and little asses.'  These
+Lombards were not a superstitious race; they did not, like the Franks
+and Anglo-Saxons, crowd into monasteries.  I can only find four
+instances of Lombard sovereigns founding monasteries in all Paulus'
+history.  One of them, strangely enough, is that of the very Astulf
+against whom the Pope fulminated so loudly the letter from St. Peter
+which I read you.
+
+Moreover, it must be said in all fairness--the Lombards despised the
+Romans exceedingly.  So did all the Teutons.  'We Lombards,' says
+Bishop Luitprand, 'Saxons, Franks, Lorrainers, Bavarians, Sueves,
+Burgunds, consider it a sufficient insult to call our enemy a Roman;
+comprehending in that one name of Roman, whatever is ignoble,
+cowardly, avaricious, luxurious, false, in a word, every vice.'  If
+this was--as it very probably was--the feeling of the whole Teutonic
+race; and if it was repaid--as it certainly was--on the part of the
+Roman, by contempt for the 'barbarism' and 'ignorance' of the Teuton;
+what must have been the feeling between Roman and Lombard?  Contact
+must have embittered mutual contempt into an utter and internecine
+hatred, in which the Pope, as representative of the Roman people,
+could not but share.
+
+As for the political reasons, they are clear enough.  It is absurd to
+say that they wished to free Italy from Lombard tyrants.  What did
+they do but hand her over to Frankish tyrants instead?  No.  The true
+reason was this.  Gradually there had arisen in the mind of all
+Popes, from Gregory the Great onward, the idea of a spiritual
+supremacy, independent of all kings of the earth.  It was a great
+idea, as the event proved:  it was a beneficent one for Europe; but a
+ruinous one for Italy.  For the Popes were not content with spiritual
+power.  They could not conceive of it as separated from temporal
+power, and temporal power meant land.  How early they set their
+hearts on the Exarchate of Ravenna, we shall never know:  the fact is
+patent, that it was a Naboth's vineyard to them; and that to obtain
+it they called in the Franks.
+
+Their dread was, evidently, lest the Lombards should become masters
+of the whole of Italy.  A united Italy suited their views then, no
+more than it does now.  Not only did they conceive of Rome as still
+the centre of the western world, but more, their stock in trade was
+at Rome.  The chains of St. Peter, the sepulchres of St. Peter and
+St. Paul, the catacombs filled with the bones of innumerable
+martyrs;--these were their stock in trade.  By giving these, selling
+these, working miracles with these, calling pilgrims from all parts
+of Christendom to visit these in situ, they kept up their power and
+their wealth.  I do not accuse them of misusing that power and that
+wealth in those days.  They used them, on the contrary, better than
+power and wealth had been ever used in the world before.  But they
+were dependent on the sanctity attached to a particular spot; and any
+power, which, like the Lombard, tended to give Italy another centre
+than Rome, they dreaded and disliked.  That Lombard basilica, near
+Milan, with all its treasures, must have been in their eyes, a
+formidable rival.  Still more frightful must it have been to them to
+see Astulf, when he encamped before the walls of Rome, searching for
+martyrs' relics, and carrying them off to Milan.  That, as a fact,
+seems to have been the exciting cause of Stephen's journey to Pepin.
+This Astulf was a good Catholic.  He founded a nunnery, and put his
+own daughters in it.  What could a man do more meritorious in the
+eyes of the Pope?  But he took away the lands of the Church, and
+worse, the relics, the reserved capital by which the Church purchased
+lands.  This was indeed a crime only to be expiated by the horrors of
+a Frank invasion.
+
+On the same principle the Popes supported the Exarchs of Ravenna, and
+the independent duchies of Spoleto and Beneventum.  Well or ill
+ruled, Iconoclast or not, they were necessary to keep Italy divided
+and weak.  And having obtained what they wanted from Pepin and
+Charlemagne, it was still their interest to pursue the same policy;
+to compound for their own independence, as they did with Charlemagne
+and his successors, by defending the pretences of foreign kings to
+the sovereignty of the rest of Italy.  This has been their policy for
+centuries.  It is their policy still; and that policy has been the
+curse of Italy.  This fatal gift of the patrimony of St. Peter--as
+Dante saw--as Machiavelli saw,--as all clear-sighted Italians have
+seen,--as we are seeing it now in these very days--has kept her
+divided, torn by civil wars, conquered and reconquered by foreign
+invaders.  Unable, as a celibate ecclesiastic, to form his dominions
+into a strong hereditary kingdom; unable, as the hierophant of a
+priestly caste, to unite his people in the bonds of national life;
+unable, as Borgia tried to do, to conquer the rest of Italy for
+himself; and form it into a kingdom large enough to have weight in
+the balance of power; the Pope has been forced, again and again, to
+keep himself on his throne by intriguing with foreign princes, and
+calling in foreign arms; and the bane of Italy, from the time of
+Stephen III. to that of Pius IX., has been the temporal power of the
+Pope.
+
+But on the popes, also, the Nemesis came.  In building their power on
+the Roman relics, on the fable that Rome was the patrimony of Peter,
+they had built on a lie; and that lie avenged itself.
+
+Had they been independent of the locality of Rome; had they been
+really spiritual emperors, by becoming cosmopolitan, journeying, it
+may be, from nation to nation in regular progresses, then their power
+might have been as boundless as they ever desired it should be.
+Having committed themselves to the false position of being petty
+kings of a petty kingdom, they had to endure continual treachery and
+tyranny from their foreign allies; to see not merely Italy, but Rome
+itself insulted, and even sacked, by faithful Catholics; and to
+become more and more, as the centuries rolled on, the tools of those
+very kings whom they had wished to make their tools.
+
+True, they defended themselves long, and with astonishing skill and
+courage.  Their sources of power were two, the moral, and the
+thaumaturgic; and they used them both:  but when the former failed,
+the latter became useless.  As long as their moral power was real; as
+long as they and their clergy were on the whole, in spite of enormous
+faults, the best men in Europe; so long the people believed in them,
+and in their thaumaturgic relics likewise.  But they became by no
+means the best men in Europe.  Then they began to think that after
+all it was more easy to work the material than the moral power--
+easier to work the bones than to work righteousness.  They were
+deceived.  Behold! when the righteousness was gone, the bones refused
+to work.  People began to question the virtues of the bones, and to
+ask, We can believe that the bones may have worked miracles for good
+men, but for bad men?  We will examine whether they work any miracles
+at all.  And then, behold, it came out that the bones did not work
+miracles, and that possibly they were not saints' bones at all; and
+then the storm came:  and the lie, as all lies do, punished itself.
+The salt had lost its savour.  The Teutonic intellect appealed from
+its old masters to God, and to God's universe of facts, and
+emancipated itself once and for all.  They who had been the light of
+Europe, became its darkness; they who had been first, became last; a
+warning to mankind until the end of time, that on Truth and Virtue
+depends the only abiding strength.
+
+
+
+LECTURE XII--THE STRATEGY OF PROVIDENCE
+
+
+
+I no not know whether any of you know much of the theory of war.  I
+know very little myself.  But something of it one is bound to know,
+as Professor of History.  For, unfortunately, a large portion of the
+history of mankind is the history of war; and the historian, as a man
+who wants to know how things were done--as distinct from the
+philosopher, the man who wants to know how things ought to have been
+done--ought to know a little of the first of human arts--the art of
+killing.  What little I know thereof I shall employ to-day, in
+explaining to you the invasion of the Teutons, from a so-called
+mechanical point of view.  I wish to shew you how it was possible for
+so small and uncivilized a people to conquer one so vast and so
+civilized; and what circumstances (which you may attribute to what
+cause you will:  but I to God) enabled our race to conquer in the
+most vast and important campaign the world has ever seen.
+
+I call it a campaign rather than a war.  Though it lasted 200 years
+and more, it seems to me (it will, I think, seem to you) if you look
+at the maps, as but one campaign:  I had almost said, one battle.
+There is but one problem to be solved; and therefore the operations
+of our race take a sort of unity.  The question is, how to take Rome,
+and keep it, by destroying the Roman Empire.
+
+Let us consider the two combatants--their numbers, and their
+position.
+
+One glance at the map will shew you which are the most numerous.
+When you cast your eye over the vastness of the Roman Empire from
+east to west--Italy, Switzerland, half Austria, Turkey and Greece,
+Asia Minor, Syria, Egypt, North Africa, Spain, France, Britain--and
+then compare it with the narrow German strip which reaches from the
+mouth of the Danube to the mouth of the Rhine, the disparity of area
+is enormous; ten times as great at least; perhaps more, if you
+accept, as I am inclined to do, the theory of Dr. Latham, that we
+were always 'Markmen,' men of the Marches, occupying a narrow
+frontier between the Slavs and the Roman Empire; and that Tacitus has
+included among Germans, from hearsay, many tribes of the interior of
+Bohemia, Prussia, and Poland, who were Slavs or others; and that the
+numbers and area of our race has been, on Tacitus' authority, greatly
+overrated.
+
+What then were the causes of the success of the Teutons?  Native
+courage and strength?
+
+They had these:  but you must recollect what I have told you, that
+those very qualities were employed against them; that they were
+hired, in large numbers, into the Roman armies, to fight against
+their own brothers.
+
+Unanimity?  Of that, alas! one can say but little.  The great
+Teutonic army had not only to fight the Romans, but to fight each
+brigade the brigade before it, to make them move on; and the brigade
+behind it likewise, to prevent their marching over them; while too
+often two brigades quarrelled like children, and destroyed each other
+on the spot.
+
+What, then, was the cause of their success?  I think a great deal of
+it must be attributed to their admirable military position.
+
+Look at a map of Europe; putting yourself first at the point to be
+attacked--at Rome, and looking north, follow the German frontier from
+the Euxine up the Danube and down the Rhine.  It is a convex arc:
+but not nearly as long as the concave arc of the Roman frontier
+opposed to it.  The Roman frontier overlaps it to the north-west by
+all Britain, to the south-west by part of Turkey and the whole of
+Asia Minor.
+
+That would seem to make it weak, and liable to be outflanked on
+either wing.  In reality it made it strong.
+
+Both the German wings rested on the sea; one on the Euxine, one on
+the North Sea.  That in itself would not have given strength; for the
+Roman fleets were masters of the seas.  But the lands in the rear, on
+either flank, were deserts, incapable of supporting an army.  What
+would have been the fate of a force landed at the mouth of the Weser
+on the north, or at the mouth of the Dnieper at the west?  Starvation
+among wild moors, and bogs, and steppes, if they attempted to leave
+their base of operations on the coast.  The Romans saw this, and
+never tried the plan.  To defend the centre of their position was the
+safest and easiest plan.
+
+Look at this centre.  It is complicated.  The Roman position is
+guarded by the walls of Italy, the gigantic earthwork of the Alps.
+To storm them, is impossible.  But right and left of them, the German
+position has two remarkable points--strategic points, which decided
+the fate of the world.
+
+They are two salient angles, promontories of the German frontier.
+The one is north-east of Switzerland; the Allman country, between the
+head-waters of the Danube and the Upper Rhine, Basle is its apex.
+Mentz its northern point, Ratisbon its southern.  That triangle
+encloses the end of the Schwartzwald; the Black Forest of primaeval
+oak.  Those oaks have saved Europe.
+
+The advantages of a salient angle of that kind, in invading an
+enemy's country, are manifest.  You can break out on either side, and
+return at once into your own country on 'lines of interior
+operation;' while the enemy has to march round the angle, three feet
+for your one, on 'lines of exterior operation.'  The early German
+invaders saw that, and burst again and again into Gaul from that
+angle.  The Romans saw it also (admirable strategists as they were)
+and built Hadrian's wall right across it, from the Maine to the
+Danube, to keep them back.  And why did not Hadrian's wall keep them
+back?  On account of the Black Forest.  The Roman never dared to face
+it; to attempt to break our centre, and to save Italy by carrying the
+war into the heart of Germany.  They knew (what the invaders of
+England will discover to their cost) that a close woodland is a more
+formidable barrier than the Alps themselves.  The Black Forest, I
+say, was the key of our position, and saved our race.
+
+From this salient angle, and along the whole Rhine above it, the
+Western Teutons could throw their masses into Gaul; Franks, Vandals,
+Alans, Suevi, following each other in echellon.  You know what an
+echellon means?  When bodies of troops move in lines parallel to each
+other, but each somewhat in the rear of the other, so that their
+whole position resembles an echelle--a flight of steps.  This mode of
+attack has two great advantages.  It cannot be outflanked by the
+enemy; and he dare not concentrate his forces on the foremost
+division, and beat the divisions in detail.  If he tries to do so, he
+is out-flanked himself; and he is liable to be beaten in detail by
+continually fresh bodies of troops.  Thus only a part of his line is
+engaged at a time.  Now it was en echellon, from necessity, that the
+tribes moved down.  They could not follow immediately in each other's
+track, because two armies following each other would not have found
+subsistence in the same country.  They had to march in parallel
+lines; those nearest to Italy moving first; and thus forming a vast
+echellon, whose advanced left rested on, and was protected by, the
+Alps.
+
+But you must remember (and this is important) that all these western
+attacks along the Rhine and Rhone were mistakes, in as far as they
+were aimed at Rome.  The Teutons were not aware, I suppose, that the
+Alps turned to the South between Gaul and Italy, and ran right down
+to the Mediterranean.  There they found themselves still cut off from
+Rome by them.  Hannibal's pass over the Mont Cenis they seem not to
+have known.  They had to range down to the Mediterranean; turn
+eastward along the Genoese coast at Nice; and then, far away from
+their base of operations, were cut off again and again, just as the
+Cimbri and Teutons were cut off by Marius.  All attempts to take Rome
+from the Piedmontese entrance into Italy failed.  But these western
+attacks had immense effects.  They cut the Roman position in two.
+
+And then came out the real weakness of that great ill-gotten Empire,
+conquered for conquering's sake.  To the north-west, the Romans had
+extended their line far beyond what they could defend.  The whole of
+North Gaul was taken by the Franks.  Britain was then isolated, and
+had to be given up to its fate.  South Gaul, being nearer to Italy
+their base, they could defend, and did, like splendid soldiers as
+they were; but that defence only injured them.  It thrust the
+foremost columns of the enemy on into Spain.  Spain was too far from
+their base of operation to be defended, and was lost likewise, and
+seized by Vandals and Suevi.  The true point of attack was at the
+other salient angle of our position, on the Roman right centre.
+
+You know that the Danube as you ascend it lies east and west from the
+Black Sea to Belgrade; but above the point where the Save enters it,
+it turns north almost at right angles.  This is the second salient
+point; the real key of the whole Roman Empire.  For from this point
+the Germans could menace--equally, Constantinople and Turkey on the
+right (I speak always as standing at Rome and looking north), and
+Italy and Rome on the left.  The Danube once crossed, between them
+and Constantinople was nothing but the rich rolling land of Turkey;
+between them and Rome nothing but the easy passes of the Carnic Alps,
+Laybach to Trieste.  Trieste was the key of the Roman position.  It
+was, and always will be, a most important point.  It might be the
+centre of a great kingdom.  The nation which has it ought to spend
+its last bullet in defending it.
+
+The Teutons did cross the Danube, as you know, in 376, and had a
+great victory, of which nothing came but moral force.  They waited
+long in Moesia before they found out the important step which they
+had made.  The genius of Alaric first discovered the key of the Roman
+position, and discovered that it was in his own hands.
+
+I do not say that no Germans had crossed the Laybach pass before him.
+On the contrary, Markmen, Quadi, Vandals, seem to have come over it
+as early as 180, and appeared under the walls of Aquileia.  Of
+course, some one must have gone first, or Alaric would not have known
+of it.  There were no maps then, at least among our race.  Their
+great generals had to feel their way foot by foot, trusting to
+hearsays of old adventurers, deserters, and what not, as to whether a
+fruitful country or an impassable alp, a great city or the world's
+end, was twenty miles a-head of them.  Yes, they had great generals
+among them, and Alaric, perhaps, the greatest.
+
+If you consider Alaric's campaigns, from A.D. 400 to A.D. 415, you
+will see that the eye of a genius planned them.  He wanted Rome, as
+all Teutons did.  He was close to Italy, in the angle of which I just
+spoke; but instead of going hither, he resolved to go south, and
+destroy Greece, and he did it.  Thereby, if you will consider, he cut
+the Roman Empire in two.  He paralysed and destroyed the right wing
+of its forces, which might, if he had marched straight for Italy,
+have come up from Greece and Turkey, to take him in flank and rear.
+He prevented their doing that; he prevented also their succouring
+Italy by sea by the same destruction.  And then he was free to move
+on Rome, knowing that he leaves no strong place on his left flank,
+save Constantinople itself; and that the Ostrogoths, and other tribes
+left behind, would mask it for him.  Then he moved into Italy over
+the Carnic Alps, and was repulsed the first time at Pollentia.  He
+was not disheartened; he retired upon Hungary, waited five years,
+tried it again, and succeeded, after a campaign of two years.
+
+Yes.  He was a great general.  To be able to move vast masses of men
+safely through a hostile country and in face of an enemy's army
+(beside women and children) requires an amount of talent bestowed on
+few.  Alaric could do it.  Dietrich the Ostrogoth could do it.
+Alboin the Lombard could do it, though not under such fearful
+disadvantages.  There were generals before Marlborough or Napoleon.
+
+And do not fancy that the work was easy; that the Romans were
+degenerate enough to be an easy prey.  Alaric had been certainly
+beaten out of Italy, even though the victory of Pollentia was
+exaggerated.  And in 405, Radagast with 200,000 men had tried to take
+Rome by Alaric's route, and had simply, from want of generalship,
+been forced to capitulate under the walls of Florence, and the
+remnant of his army sold for slaves.
+
+Why was Alaric more fortunate?  Because he was a great genius.  And
+why when he died, did the Goths lose all plan, and wander wildly up
+Italy, and out into Spain?  Because the great genius was gone.
+Native Teuton courage could ensure no permanent success against Roman
+discipline and strategy, unless guided by men like Alaric or
+Dietrich.
+
+You might fancy the campaign over now:  but it was not.  Along the
+country of the Danube, from the Euxine to the Alps, the Teutons had
+still the advantage of interior lines, and vast bodies of men--
+Herules, Gepids, Ostrogoths, Lombards--were coming down in an
+enormous echellon similar to that which forced the Rhine; to force
+Italy at the same fatal point--Venetia.  The party who could command
+the last reserve would win, as is the rule.  And the last reserves
+were with our race.  They must win.  But not yet.  They had, in the
+mean time, taken up a concave line; a great arc running round the
+whole west of the Mediterranean from Italy, France, Spain, Algeria,
+as far as Carthage.  They could not move forces round that length of
+coast, as fast as the Romans could move them by sea; and they had no
+fleets.  Although they had conquered the Western Empire, they were in
+a very dangerous position, and were about to be very nearly ruined.
+
+For you see, the Romans in turn had changed front at more than a
+right angle.  They lay at first north-west and south-east.  They lay
+in Justinian's time, north and south.  Their right was
+Constantinople; their left Pentapolis; between those two points they
+held Greece, Asia Minor, Syria and Egypt; a position of wealth
+incalculable.  Meanwhile, as we must remember always, they were
+masters of the sea, and therefore of the interior lines of operation.
+They had been forced into this position; but, like Romans, they had
+accepted it.  With the boundless common sense of the race (however
+fallen, debauched, pedantic), they worked it out, and with terrible
+effect.
+
+Their right in Constantinople was so strong that they cared nothing
+for it, though it was the only exposed point.  They would defend it
+by hiring the Barbarians, and when they could not pay them, setting
+them on to kill down each other; while they quietly drew into
+Constantinople the boundless crops of Asia, Syria and Egypt.
+
+The strength of Constantinople was infinite--commanding two seas and
+two continents.  It is, as the genius of Constantinople saw--as the
+genius of the Czar Nicholas saw--the strongest spot, perhaps, in the
+world.  That fact was what enabled Justinian's Empire to arise again,
+and enabled Belisarius and Narses to reconquer Africa and Italy.
+Remember that, and see how strong the Romans were still.
+
+The Teutons meanwhile had changed their front, by conquering the
+Western Mediterranean, and were becoming weak, because scattered on
+exterior lines, to their extreme danger.
+
+I cannot exaggerate the danger of that position.  It enabled the
+Romans by rapid movements of their fleets, to reconquer Africa and
+Italy.  It might have enabled them to do much more.
+
+Belisarius, with great wisdom, began by attacking the Vandals at
+Carthage on the extreme right.  They had put themselves into an
+isolated position, and were destroyed without help.  Then he moved on
+Italy and the Ostrogoths.  He was going to force the positions in
+detail, and drive them back behind the Alps.  What he did not finish,
+Narses did; and the Teutons were actually driven back behind the Alps
+for some years.
+
+But Narses had to stop at Italy.  Even if not recalled, he could have
+gone no further.  The next move should have been on Spain, if he had
+really had strength in Italy.  But to attack Spain from
+Constantinople, would have been to go too far from home.  The Franks
+would have crost the Pyrenees, and fallen on his flank.  The
+Visigoths, even if beaten, would have been only pushed across the
+Straits of Gibraltar, to reconquer the Vandal coast of Africa; while
+to take troops from Italy for any such purpose, would have been to
+let in the Lombards--who came, let in or not.  There were reserves in
+Germany still, of which Narses knew full well; for he had seen 5000
+Lombards, besides Herules, and Huns, and Avars, fight for him at
+Nuceria, and destroy the Ostrogoths; and he knew well that they
+could, if they chose, fight against him.
+
+On the other hand, the Roman Empire had no reserves; while the
+campaign had just come to that point at which he who can bring up the
+last reserve wins.  Ours were so far from being exhausted, that the
+heaviest of them, the Franks, came into action, stronger than ever,
+200 years after.
+
+But the Roman reserves were gone.  If Greece, if Asia Minor, if
+Egypt, had been the holds of a hardy people, the Romans might have
+done still--Heaven alone knows what.  At least, they might have
+extended their front once more to the line of Carthage, Sicily,
+Italy.
+
+But the people of Syria and Egypt, were--what they were.  No
+recruits, as far as I know, were drawn from them.  Had they been,
+they would have been face to face with a Frank, or a Lombard, or a
+Visigoth, much what--not a Sikh, a Rohilla, or a Ghoorka, but a
+Bengalee proper--would be face to face with an Englishman.  One
+thousand Varangers might have walked from Constantinople to
+Alexandria without fighting a pitched battle, if they had had only
+Greeks and Syrians to face.
+
+Thus the Romans were growing weak.  If we had lost, so had they.
+Every wild Teuton who came down to perish, had destroyed a Roman, or
+more than one, before he died.  Each column which the admirable skill
+and courage of the Romans had destroyed, had weakened them as much,
+perhaps more, than its destruction weakened the Teutons; and had, by
+harrying the country, destroyed the Roman's power of obtaining
+supplies.  Italy and Turkey at last became too poor to be a fighting
+ground at all.
+
+But now comes in one of the strangest new elements in this strange
+epic--Mohammed and his Arabs.
+
+Suddenly, these Arab tribes, under the excitement of the new
+Mussulman creed, burst forth of the unknown East.  They take the
+Eastern Empire in the rear; by such a rear attack as the world never
+saw before or since; they cut it in two; devour it up:  and save
+Europe thereby.
+
+That may seem a strange speech.  I must explain it.  I have told you
+how the Eastern Empire and its military position was immensely
+strong; that Constantinople was a great maritime base of operations,
+mistress of the Mediterranean.  What prevented the Romans from
+reconquering all the shores of that sea, and establishing themselves
+in strength in the Morea, or in Sicily, or in Carthage, or in any
+central base of operations?  What forced them to cling to
+Constantinople, and fight a losing campaign thenceforth.  Simply
+this; the Mussulman had forced their position from the rear, and
+deprived them of Syria, Egypt, Africa.
+
+But the Teutons could not have opposed them.  During the 7th century
+the Lombards in Italy were lazy and divided; the Goths in Spain
+lazier and more divided still; the Franks were tearing themselves in
+pieces by civil war.  The years from A.D. 550 to A.D. 750 and the
+rise of the Carlovingian dynasty, were a period of exhaustion for our
+race, such as follows on great victories, and the consequent
+slaughter and collapse.
+
+This was the critical period of the Teutonic race; little talked of,
+because little known:  but very perilous.  Nevertheless, whatever the
+Eastern Empire might have done, the Saracens prevented its doing; and
+if you hold (with me) that the welfare of the Teutonic race is the
+welfare of the world; then, meaning nothing less, the Saracen
+invasion, by crippling the Eastern Empire, saved Europe and our race.
+
+And now, gentlemen, was this vast campaign fought without a general?
+If Trafalgar could not be won without the mind of a Nelson, or
+Waterloo without the mind of a Wellington, was there no one mind to
+lead those innumerable armies, on whose success depended the future
+of the whole human race?  Did no one marshal them in that impregnable
+convex front, from the Euxine to the North Sea?  No one guide them to
+the two great strategic centres, of the Black Forest and Trieste?  No
+one cause them, blind barbarians without maps or science, to follow
+those rules of war, without which victory in a protracted struggle is
+impossible; and by the pressure of the Huns behind, force on their
+flagging myriads to an enterprise which their simplicity fancied at
+first beyond the powers of mortal men?  Believe it who will:  but I
+cannot.  I may be told that they gravitated into their places, as
+stones and mud do.  Be it so.  They obeyed natural laws of course, as
+all things do on earth, when they obeyed the laws of war:  those too
+are natural laws, explicable on simple mathematical principles.  But
+while I believe that not a stone or a handful of mud gravitates into
+its place without the will of God; that it was ordained, ages since,
+into what particular spot each grain of gold should be washed down
+from an Australian quartz reef, that a certain man might find it at a
+certain moment and crisis of his life;--if I be superstitious enough
+(as thank God I am) to hold that creed, shall I not believe that
+though this great war had no general upon earth, it may have had a
+general in Heaven? and that in spite of all their sins, the hosts of
+our forefathers were the hosts of God?
+
+
+
+APPENDIX:  THE LIMITS OF EXACT SCIENCE AS APPLIED TO HISTORY.
+
+
+
+It is with a feeling of awe, I had almost said of fear, that I find
+myself in this place, upon this errand.  The responsibility of a
+teacher of History in Cambridge is in itself very heavy:  but doubly
+heavy in the case of one who sees among his audience many men as fit,
+it may be some more fit, to fill this Chair:  and again, more heavy
+still, when one succeeds to a man whose learning, like his virtues,
+one can never hope to equal.
+
+But a Professor, I trust, is like other men, capable of improvement;
+and the great law, 'docendo disces,' may be fulfilled in him, as in
+other men.  Meanwhile, I can only promise that such small powers as I
+possess will be honestly devoted to this Professorate; and that I
+shall endeavour to teach Modern History after a method which shall
+give satisfaction to the Rulers of this University.
+
+I shall do that best, I believe, by keeping in mind the lessons which
+I, in common with thousands more, have learnt from my wise and good
+predecessor.  I do not mean merely patience in research, and accuracy
+in fact.  They are required of all men:  and they may be learnt from
+many men.  But what Sir James Stephen's life and writings should
+especially teach us, is the beauty and the value of charity; of that
+large-hearted humanity, which sympathizes with all noble, generous,
+earnest thought and endeavour, in whatsoever shape they may have
+appeared; a charity which, without weakly or lazily confounding the
+eternal laws of right and wrong, can make allowances for human
+frailty; can separate the good from the evil in men and in theories;
+can understand, and can forgive, because it loves.  Who can read Sir
+James Stephen's works without feeling more kindly toward many a man,
+and many a form of thought, against which he has been more or less
+prejudiced; without a more genial view of human nature, a more
+hopeful view of human destiny, a more full belief in the great
+saying, that 'Wisdom is justified of all her children'?  Who, too,
+can read those works without seeing how charity enlightens the
+intellect, just as bigotry darkens it; how events, which to the
+theorist and the pedant are merely monstrous and unmeaning, may
+explain themselves easily enough to the man who will put himself in
+his fellow-creatures' place; who will give them credit for being men
+of like passions with himself; who will see with their eyes, feel
+with their hearts, and take for his motto, 'Homo sum, nil humani a me
+alienum puto'?
+
+I entreat gentlemen who may hereafter attend my lectures to bear in
+mind this last saying.  If they wish to understand History, they must
+first try to understand men and women.  For History is the history of
+men and women, and of nothing else; and he who knows men and women
+thoroughly will best understand the past work of the world, and be
+best able to carry on its work now.  The men who, in the long run,
+have governed the world, have been those who understood the human
+heart; and therefore it is to this day the statesman who keeps the
+reins in his hand, and not the mere student.  He is a man of the
+world; he knows how to manage his fellow-men; and therefore he can
+get work done which the mere student (it may be) has taught him ought
+to be done; but which the mere student, much less the mere trader or
+economist, could not get done; simply because his fellow-men would
+probably not listen to him, and certainly outwit him.  Of course, in
+proportion to the depth, width, soundness, of his conception of human
+nature, will be the greatness and wholesomeness of his power.  He may
+appeal to the meanest, or to the loftiest motives.  He may be a fox
+or an eagle; a Borgia, or a Hildebrand; a Talleyrand, or a Napoleon;
+a Mary Stuart, or an Elizabeth:  but however base, however noble, the
+power which he exercises is the same in essence.  He makes History,
+because he understands men.  And you, if you would understand
+History, must understand men.
+
+If, therefore, any of you should ask me how to study history, I
+should answer--Take by all means biographies:  wheresoever possible,
+autobiographies; and study them.  Fill your minds with live human
+figures; men of like passions with yourselves; see how each lived and
+worked in the time and place in which God put him.  Believe me, that
+when you have thus made a friend of the dead, and brought him to life
+again, and let him teach you to see with his eyes, and feel with his
+heart, you will begin to understand more of his generation and his
+circumstances, than all the mere history-books of the period would
+teach you.  In proportion as you understand the man, and only so,
+will you begin to understand the elements in which he worked.  And
+not only to understand, but to remember.  Names, dates, genealogies,
+geographical details, costumes, fashions, manners, crabbed scraps of
+old law, which you used, perhaps, to read up and forget again,
+because they were not rooted, but stuck into your brain, as pins are
+into a pincushion, to fall out at the first shake--all these you will
+remember; because they will arrange and organize themselves around
+the central human figure:  just as, if you have studied a portrait by
+some great artist, you cannot think of the face in it, without
+recollecting also the light and shadow, the tone of colouring, the
+dress, the very details of the background, and all the accessories
+which the painter's art has grouped around; each with a purpose, and
+therefore each fixing itself duly in your mind.  Who, for instance,
+has not found that he can learn more French history from French
+memoirs, than even from all the truly learned and admirable histories
+of France which have been written of late years?  There are those,
+too, who will say of good old Plutarch's lives (now-a-days, I think,
+too much neglected), what some great man used to say of Shakspeare
+and English history--that all the ancient history which they really
+knew, they had got from Plutarch.  I am free to confess that I have
+learnt what little I know of the middle-ages, what they were like,
+how they came to be what they were, and how they issued in the
+Reformation, not so much from the study of the books about them (many
+and wise though they are), as from the thumbing over, for years, the
+semi-mythical saints' lives of Surius and the Bollandists.
+
+Without doubt History obeys, and always has obeyed, in the long run,
+certain laws.  But those laws assert themselves, and are to be
+discovered, not in things, but in persons; in the actions of human
+beings; and just in proportion as we understand human beings, shall
+we understand the laws which they have obeyed, or which have avenged
+themselves on their disobedience.  This may seem a truism:  if it be
+such, it is one which we cannot too often repeat to ourselves just
+now, when the rapid progress of science is tempting us to look at
+human beings rather as things than as persons, and at abstractions
+(under the name of laws) rather as persons than as things.
+Discovering, to our just delight, order and law all around us, in a
+thousand events which seemed to our fathers fortuitous and arbitrary,
+we are dazzled just now by the magnificent prospect opening before
+us, and fall, too often, into more than one serious mistake.
+
+First; students try to explain too often all the facts which they
+meet by the very few laws which they know; and especially moral
+phaenomena by physical, or at least economic laws.  There is an
+excuse for this last error.  Much which was thought, a few centuries
+since, to belong to the spiritual world, is now found to belong to
+the material; and the physician is consulted, where the exorcist used
+to be called in.  But it is a somewhat hasty corollary therefrom, and
+one not likely to find favour in this University, that moral laws and
+spiritual agencies have nothing at all to do with the history of the
+human race.  We shall not be inclined here, I trust, to explain (as
+some one tried to do lately) the Crusades by a hypothesis of over-
+stocked labour-markets on the Continent.
+
+Neither, again, shall we be inclined to class those same Crusades
+among 'popular delusions,' and mere outbursts of folly and madness.
+This is a very easy, and I am sorry to say, a very common method of
+disposing of facts which will not fit into the theory, too common of
+late, that need and greed have been always, and always ought to be,
+the chief motives of mankind.  Need and greed, heaven knows, are
+powerful enough:  but I think that he who has something nobler in
+himself than need and greed, will have eyes to discern something
+nobler than them, in the most fantastic superstitions, in the most
+ferocious outbursts, of the most untutored masses.  Thank God, that
+those who preach the opposite doctrine belie it so often by a happy
+inconsistency; that he who declares self-interest to be the
+mainspring of the world, can live a life of virtuous self-sacrifice;
+that he who denies, with Spinoza, the existence of free-will, can
+disprove his own theory, by willing, like Spinoza, amid all the
+temptations of the world, to live a life worthy of a Roman Stoic; and
+that he who represents men as the puppets of material circumstance,
+and who therefore has no logical right either to praise virtue, or to
+blame vice, can shew, by a healthy admiration of the former, a
+healthy scorn of the latter, how little his heart has been corrupted
+by the eidola specus, the phantoms of the study, which have oppressed
+his brain.  But though men are often, thank heaven, better than their
+doctrines, yet the goodness of the man does not make his doctrine
+good; and it is immoral as well as unphilosophical to call a thing
+hard names simply because it cannot be fitted into our theory of the
+universe.  Immoral, because all harsh and hasty wholesale judgments
+are immoral; unphilosophical, because the only philosophical method
+of looking at the strangest of phaenomena is to believe that it too
+is the result of law, perhaps a healthy result; that it is not to be
+condemned as a product of disease before it is proven to be such; and
+that if it be a product of disease, disease has its laws, as much as
+health; and is a subject, not for cursing, but for induction; so that
+(to return to my example) if every man who ever took part in the
+Crusades were proved to have been simply mad, our sole business would
+be to discover why he went mad upon that special matter, and at that
+special time.  And to do that, we must begin by recollecting that in
+every man who went forth to the Crusades, or to any other strange
+adventure of humanity, was a whole human heart and brain, of like
+strength and weakness, like hopes, like temptations, with our own;
+and find out what may have driven him mad, by considering what would
+have driven us mad in his place.
+
+May I be permitted to enlarge somewhat on this topic?  There is, as
+you are aware, a demand just now for philosophies of History.  The
+general spread of Inductive Science has awakened this appetite; the
+admirable contemporary French historians have quickened it by feeding
+it; till, the more order and sequence we find in the facts of the
+past, the more we wish to find.  So it should be (or why was man
+created a rational being?) and so it is; and the requirements of the
+more educated are becoming so peremptory, that many thinking men
+would be ready to say (I should be sorry to endorse their opinion),
+that if History is not studied according to exact scientific method,
+it need not be studied at all.
+
+A very able anonymous writer has lately expressed this general
+tendency of modern thought in language so clear and forcible that I
+must beg leave to quote it:  -
+
+'Step by step,' he says, 'the notion of evolution by law is
+transforming the whole field of our knowledge and opinion.  It is not
+one order of conception which comes under its influence:  but it is
+the whole sphere of our ideas, and with them the whole system of our
+action and conduct.  Not the physical world alone is now the domain
+of inductive science, but the moral, the intellectual, and the
+spiritual are being added to its empire.  Two co-ordinate ideas
+pervade the vision of every thinker, physicist or moralist,
+philosopher or priest.  In the physical and the moral world, in the
+natural and the human, are ever seen two forces--invariable rule, and
+continual advance; law and action; order and progress; these two
+powers working harmoniously together, and the result, inevitable
+sequence, orderly movement, irresistible growth.  In the physical
+world indeed, order is most prominent to our eyes; in the moral world
+it is progress, but both exist as truly in the one as in the other.
+In the scale of nature, as we rise from the inorganic to the organic,
+the idea of change becomes even more distinct; just as when we rise
+through the gradations of the moral world, the idea of order becomes
+more difficult to grasp.  It was the last task of the astronomer to
+show eternal change even in the grand order of our Solar System.  It
+is the crown of philosophy to see immutable law even in the complex
+action of human life.  In the latter, indeed, it is but the first
+germs which are clear.  No rational thinker hopes to discover more
+than some few primary actions of law, and some approximative theory
+of growth.  Much is dark and contradictory.  Numerous theories
+differing in method and degree are offered; nor do we decide between
+them.  We insist now only upon this, that the principle of
+development in the moral, as in the physical, has been definitely
+admitted; and something like a conception of one grand analogy
+through the whole sphere of knowledge, has almost become a part of
+popular opinion.  Most men shrink from any broad statement of the
+principle, though all in some special instances adopt it.  It
+surrounds every idea of our life, and is diffused in every branch of
+study.  The press, the platform, the lecture-room, and the pulpit
+ring with it in every variety of form.  Unconscious pedants are
+proving it.  It flashes on the statistician through his registers; it
+guides the hand of simple philanthropy; it is obeyed by the instinct
+of the statesman.  There is not an act of our public life which does
+not acknowledge it.  No man denies that there are certain, and even
+practical laws of political economy.  They are nothing but laws of
+society.  The conferences of social reformers, the congresses for
+international statistics and for social science bear witness of its
+force.  Everywhere we hear of the development of the constitution, of
+public law, of public opinion, of institutions, of forms of society,
+of theories of history.  In a word, whatever views of history may be
+inculcated on the Universities by novelists or epigrammatists, it is
+certain that the best intellects and spirits of our day are labouring
+to see more of that invariable order, and of that principle of growth
+in the life of human societies and of the great society of mankind
+which nearly all men, more or less, acknowledge, and partially and
+unconsciously confirm.'
+
+This passage expresses admirably, I think, the tendencies of modern
+thought for good and evil.
+
+For good.  For surely it is good, and a thing to thank God for, that
+men should be more and more expecting order, searching for order,
+welcoming order.  But for evil also.  For young sciences, like young
+men, have their time of wonder, hope, imagination, and of passion
+too, and haste, and bigotry.  Dazzled, and that pardonably, by the
+beauty of the few laws they may have discovered, they are too apt to
+erect them into gods, and to explain by them all matters in heaven
+and earth; and apt, too, as I think this author does, to patch them
+where they are weakest, by that most dangerous succedaneum of vague
+and grand epithets, which very often contain, each of them, an
+assumption far more important than the law to which they are tacked.
+
+Such surely are the words which so often occur in this passage--
+'Invariable, continual, immutable, inevitable, irresistible.'  There
+is an ambiguity in these words, which may lead--which I believe does
+lead--to most unphilosophical conclusions.  They are used very much
+as synonyms; not merely in this passage, but in the mouths of men.
+Are you aware that those who carelessly do so, blink the whole of the
+world-old arguments between necessity and free-will?  Whatever may be
+the rights of that quarrel, they are certainly not to be assumed in a
+passing epithet.  But what else does the writer do, who tells us that
+an inevitable sequence, an irresistible growth, exists in the moral
+as well as in the physical world; and then says, as a seemingly
+identical statement, that it is the crown of philosophy to see
+immutable law, even in the complex action of human life?
+
+The crown of philosophy?  Doubtless it is so.  But not a crown, I
+should have thought, which has been reserved as the special glory of
+these latter days.  Very early, at least in the known history of
+mankind, did Philosophy (under the humble names of Religion and
+Common Sense) see most immutable, and even eternal, laws, in the
+complex action of human life, even the laws of right and wrong; and
+called them The Everlasting Judgments of God, to which a confused and
+hard-worked man was to look; and take comfort, for all would be well
+at last.  By fair induction (as I believe) did man discover, more or
+less clearly, those eternal laws:  by repeated verifications of them
+in every age, man has been rising, and will yet rise, to clearer
+insight into their essence, their limits, their practical results.
+And if it be these, the old laws of right and wrong, which this
+author and his school call invariable and immutable, we shall, I
+trust, most heartily agree with them; only wondering why a moral
+government of the world seems to them so very recent a discovery.
+
+But we shall not agree with them, I trust, when they represent these
+invariable and immutable laws as resulting in any inevitable
+sequence, or irresistible growth.  We shall not deny a sequence--
+Reason forbids that; or again, a growth--Experience forbids that:
+but we shall be puzzled to see why a law, because it is immutable
+itself, should produce inevitable results; and if they quote the
+facts of material nature against us, we shall be ready to meet them
+on that very ground, and ask: --You say that as the laws of matter
+are inevitable, so probably are the laws of human life?  Be it so:
+but in what sense are the laws of matter inevitable?  Potentially, or
+actually?  Even in the seemingly most uniform and universal law,
+where do we find the inevitable or the irresistible?  Is there not in
+nature a perpetual competition of law against law, force against
+force, producing the most endless and unexpected variety of results?
+Cannot each law be interfered with at any moment by some other law,
+so that the first law, though it may struggle for the mastery, shall
+be for an indefinite time utterly defeated?  The law of gravity is
+immutable enough:  but do all stones inevitably fall to the ground?
+Certainly not, if I choose to catch one, and keep it in my hand.  It
+remains there by laws; and the law of gravity is there too, making it
+feel heavy in my hand:  but it has not fallen to the ground, and will
+not, till I let it.  So much for the inevitable action of the laws of
+gravity, as of others.  Potentially, it is immutable; but actually it
+can be conquered by other laws.
+
+I really beg your pardon for occupying you here with such truisms:
+but I must put the students of this University in mind of them, as
+long as too many modern thinkers shall choose to ignore them.
+
+Even if then, as it seems to me, the history of mankind depended
+merely on physical laws, analogous to those which govern the rest of
+nature, it would be a hopeless task for us to discover an inevitable
+sequence in History, even though we might suppose that such existed.
+But as long as man has the mysterious power of breaking the laws of
+his own being, such a sequence not only cannot be discovered, but it
+cannot exist.  For man can break the laws of his own being, whether
+physical, intellectual, or moral.  He breaks them every day, and has
+always been breaking them.
+
+The greater number of them he cannot obey till he knows them.  And
+too many of them he cannot know, alas, till he has broken them; and
+paid the penalty of his ignorance.  He does not, like the brute or
+the vegetable, thrive by laws of which he is not conscious:  but by
+laws of which he becomes gradually conscious; and which he can
+disobey after all.  And therefore it seems to me very like a juggle
+of words to draw analogies from the physical and irrational world,
+and apply them to the moral and rational world; and most unwise to
+bridge over the gulf between the two by such adjectives as
+'irresistible' or 'inevitable,' such nouns as 'order, sequence, law'-
+-which must bear an utterly different meaning, according as they are
+applied to physical beings or to moral ones.
+
+Indeed, so patent is the ambiguity, that I cannot fancy that it has
+escaped the author and his school; and am driven, by mere respect for
+their logical powers, to suppose that they mean no ambiguity at all;
+that they do not conceive of irrational beings as differing from
+rational beings, or the physical from the moral, or the body of man
+from his spirit, in kind and property; and that the immutable laws
+which they represent as governing human life and history have nothing
+at all to do with those laws of right and wrong, which I intend to
+set forth to you, as the 'everlasting judgments of God.'
+
+In which case, I fear, they must go their way; while we go ours;
+confessing that there is an order, and there is a law, for man; and
+that if he disturb that order, or break that law in anywise, they
+will prove themselves too strong for him, and reassert themselves,
+and go forward, grinding him to powder if he stubbornly try to stop
+their way.  But we must assert too, that his disobedience to them,
+even for a moment, has disturbed the natural course of events, and
+broken that inevitable sequence, which we may find indeed, in our own
+imaginations, as long as we sit with a book in our studies:  but
+which vanishes the moment that we step outside into practical contact
+with life; and, instead of talking cheerfully of a necessary and
+orderly progress, find ourselves more inclined to cry with the
+cynical man of the world:
+
+
+'All the windy ways of men,
+   Are but dust that rises up;
+And is lightly laid again.'
+
+
+The usual rejoinder to this argument is to fall back upon man's
+weakness and ignorance, and to take refuge in the infinite unknown.
+Man, it is said, may of course interfere a little with some of the
+less important laws of his being:  but who is he, to grapple with the
+more vast and remote ones?  Because he can prevent a pebble from
+falling, is he to suppose that he can alter the destiny of nations,
+and grapple forsooth with 'the eternities and the immensities,' and
+so forth?  The argument is very powerful:  but addrest rather to the
+imagination than the reason.  It is, after all, another form of the
+old omne ignotum pro magnifico; and we may answer, I think fairly--
+About the eternities and immensities we know nothing, not having been
+there as yet; but it is a mere assumption to suppose, without proof,
+that the more remote and impalpable laws are more vast, in the sense
+of being more powerful (the only sense which really bears upon the
+argument), than the laws which are palpably at work around us all day
+long; and if we are capable of interfering with almost every law of
+human life which we know of already, it is more philosophical to
+believe (till disproved by actual failure) that we can interfere with
+those laws of our life which we may know hereafter.  Whether it will
+pay us to interfere with them, is a different question.  It is not
+prudent to interfere with the laws of health, and it may not be with
+other laws, hereafter to be discovered.  I am only pleading that man
+can disobey the laws of his being; that such power has always been a
+disturbing force in the progress of the human race, which modern
+theories too hastily overlook; and that the science of history
+(unless the existence of the human will be denied) must belong rather
+to the moral sciences, than to that 'positive science' which seems to
+me inclined to reduce all human phaenomena under physical laws,
+hastily assumed, by the old fallacy of [Greek text which cannot be
+reproduced], to apply where there is no proof whatsoever that they do
+or even can apply.
+
+As for the question of the existence of the human will--I am not
+here, I hope, to argue that.  I shall only beg leave to assume its
+existence, for practical purposes.  I may be told (though I trust not
+in this University), that it is, like the undulatory theory of light,
+an unphilosophical 'hypothesis.'  Be that as it may, it is very
+convenient (and may be for a few centuries to come) to retain the
+said 'hypothesis,' as one retains the undulatory theory; and for the
+simple reason, that with it one can explain the phaenomena tolerably;
+and without it cannot explain them at all.
+
+A dread (half-unconscious, it may be) of this last practical result,
+seems to have crossed the mind of the author on whom I have been
+commenting; for he confesses, honestly enough (and he writes
+throughout like an honest man) that in human life 'no rational
+thinker hopes to discover more than some few primary actions of law,
+and some approximative theory of growth.'  I have higher hopes of a
+possible science of history; because I fall back on those old moral
+laws, which I think he wishes to ignore:  but I can conceive that he
+will not; because he cannot, on his own definitions of law and
+growth.  They are (if I understand him aright) to be irresistible and
+inevitable.  I say that they are not so, even in the case of trees
+and stones; much more in the world of man.  Facts, when he goes on to
+verify his theories, will leave him with a very few primary actions
+of law, a very faint approximative theory; because his theories, in
+plain English, will not work.  At the first step, at every step, they
+are stopped short by those disturbing forces, or at least disturbed
+phaenomena, which have been as yet, and probably will be hereafter,
+attributed (as the only explanation of them) to the existence, for
+good and evil, of a human will.
+
+Let us look in detail at a few of these disturbances of anything like
+inevitable or irresistible movement.  Shall we not, at the very first
+glance, confess--I am afraid only too soon--that there always have
+been fools therein; fools of whom no man could guess, or can yet,
+what they were going to do next or why they were going to do it?  And
+how, pray, can we talk of the inevitable, in the face of that one
+miserable fact of human folly, whether of ignorance or of passion,
+folly still?  There may be laws of folly, as there are laws of
+disease; and whether there are or not, we may learn much wisdom from
+folly; we may see what the true laws of humanity are, by seeing the
+penalties which come from breaking them:  but as for laws which work
+of themselves, by an irresistible movement,--how can we discover such
+in a past in which every law which we know has been outraged again
+and again?  Take one of the highest instances--the progress of the
+human intellect--I do not mean just now the spread of conscious
+science, but of that unconscious science which we call common sense.
+What hope have we of laying down exact laws for its growth, in a
+world wherein it has been ignored, insulted, crushed, a thousand
+times, sometimes in whole nations and for whole generations, by the
+stupidity, tyranny, greed, caprice of a single ruler; or if not so,
+yet by the mere superstition, laziness, sensuality, anarchy of the
+mob?  How, again, are we to arrive at any exact laws of the increase
+of population, in a race which has had, from the beginning, the
+abnormal and truly monstrous habit of slaughtering each other, not
+for food--for in a race of normal cannibals, the ratio of increase or
+decrease might easily be calculated--but uselessly, from rage, hate,
+fanaticism, or even mere wantonness?  No man is less inclined than I
+to undervalue vital statistics, and their already admirable results:
+but how can they help us, and how can we help them, in looking at
+such a past as that of three-fourths of the nations of the world?
+Look--as a single instance among too many--at that most noble nation
+of Germany, swept and stunned, by peasant wars, thirty years' wars,
+French wars, and after each hurricane, blossoming up again into brave
+industry and brave thought, to be in its turn cut off by a fresh
+storm ere it could bear full fruit:  doing nevertheless such work,
+against such fearful disadvantages, as nation never did before; and
+proving thereby what she might have done for humanity, had not she,
+the mother of all European life, been devoured, generation after
+generation, by her own unnatural children.  Nevertheless, she is
+their mother still; and her history, as I believe, the root-history
+of Europe:  but it is hard to read--the sibylline leaves are so
+fantastically torn, the characters so blotted out by tears and blood.
+
+And if such be the history of not one nation only, but of the
+average, how, I ask, are we to make calculations about such a species
+as man?  Many modern men of science wish to draw the normal laws of
+human life from the average of humanity:  I question whether they can
+do so; because I do not believe the average man to be the normal man,
+exhibiting the normal laws:  but a very abnormal man, diseased and
+crippled, but even if their method were correct, it could work in
+practice, only if the destinies of men were always decided by
+majorities:  and granting that the majority of men have common sense,
+are the minority of fools to count for nothing?  Are they powerless?
+Have they had no influence on History?  Have they even been always a
+minority, and not at times a terrible majority, doing each that which
+was right in the sight of his own eyes?  You can surely answer that
+question for yourselves.  As far as my small knowledge of History
+goes, I think it may be proved from facts, that any given people,
+down to the lowest savages, has, at any period of its life, known far
+more than it has done; known quite enough to have enabled it to have
+got on comfortably, thriven, and developed; if it had only done, what
+no man does, all that it knew it ought to do, and could do.  St.
+Paul's experience of himself is true of all mankind--'The good which
+I would, I do not; and the evil which I would not, that I do.'  The
+discrepancy between the amount of knowledge and the amount of work,
+is one of the most patent and most painful facts which strikes us in
+the history of man; and one not certainly to be explained on any
+theory of man's progress being the effect of inevitable laws, or one
+which gives us much hope of ascertaining fixed laws for that
+progress.
+
+And bear in mind, that fools are not always merely imbecile and
+obstructive; they are at times ferocious, dangerous, mad.  There is
+in human nature what Goethe used to call a demoniac element, defying
+all law, and all induction; and we can, I fear, from that one cause,
+as easily calculate the progress of the human race, as we can
+calculate that of the vines upon the slopes of AEtna, with the lava
+ready to boil up and overwhelm them at any and every moment.  Let us
+learn, in God's name, all we can, from the short intervals of average
+peace and common sense:  let us, or rather our grandchildren, get
+precious lessons from them for the next period of sanity.  But let us
+not be surprised, much less disheartened, if after learning a very
+little, some unexpected and truly demoniac factor, Anabaptist war,
+French revolution, or other, should toss all our calculations to the
+winds, and set us to begin afresh, sadder and wiser men.  We may
+learn, doubtless, even more of the real facts of human nature, the
+real laws of human history, from these critical periods, when the
+root-fibres of the human heart are laid bare, for good and evil, than
+from any smooth and respectable periods of peace and plenty:
+nevertheless their lessons are not statistical, but moral.
+
+But if human folly has been a disturbing force for evil, surely human
+reason has been a disturbing force for good.  Man can not only
+disobey the laws of his being, he can also choose between them, to an
+extent which science widens every day, and so become, what he was
+meant to be, an artificial being; artificial in his manufactures,
+habits, society, polity--what not?  All day long he has a free choice
+between even physical laws, which mere things have not, and which
+make the laws of mere things inapplicable to him.  Take the simplest
+case.  If he falls into the water, he has his choice whether he will
+obey the laws of gravity and sink, or by other laws perform the (to
+him) artificial process of swimming, and get ashore.  True, both
+would happen by law:  but he has his choice which law shall conquer,
+sink or swim.  We have yet to learn why whole nations, why all
+mankind may not use the same prudential power as to which law they
+shall obey,--which, without breaking it, they shall conquer and
+repress, as long as seems good to them.
+
+It is true, nature must be obeyed in order that she may he conquered:
+but then she is to be CONQUERED.  It has been too much the fashion of
+late to travestie that great dictum of Bacon's into a very different
+one, and say, Nature must be obeyed because she cannot be conquered;
+thus proclaiming the impotence of science to discover anything save
+her own impotence--a result as contrary to fact, as to Bacon's own
+hopes of what science would do for the welfare of the human race.
+For what is all human invention, but the transcending and conquering
+one natural law by another?  What is the practical answer which all
+mankind has been making to nature and her pretensions, whenever it
+has progressed one step since the foundation of the world:  by which
+all discoverers have discovered, all teachers taught:  by which all
+polities, kingdoms, civilizations, arts, manufactures, have
+established themselves; all who have raised themselves above the mob
+have faced the mob, and conquered the mob, crucified by them first
+and worshipped by them afterwards:  by which the first savage
+conquered the natural law which put wild beasts in the forest, by
+killing them; conquered the natural law which makes raw meat
+wholesome, by cooking it; conquered the natural law which made weeds
+grow at his hut door, by rooting them up, and planting corn instead;
+and won his first spurs in the great battle of man against nature,
+proving thereby that he was a man, and not an ape?  What but this?--
+'Nature is strong, but I am stronger.  I know her worth, but I know
+my own.  I trust her and her laws, but my trusty servant she shall
+be, and not my tyrant; and if she interfere with my ideal, even with
+my personal comfort, then Nature and I will fight it out to the last
+gasp, and Heaven defend the right!'
+
+In forgetting this, in my humble opinion, lay the error of the early,
+or laissez faire School of Political Economy.  It was too much
+inclined to say to men:  'You are the puppets of certain natural
+laws.  Your own freewill and choice, if they really exist, exist
+merely as a dangerous disease.  All you can do is to submit to the
+laws, and drift whithersoever they may carry you, for good or evil.'
+But not less certainly was the same blame to be attached to the
+French Socialist School.  It, though based on a revolt from the
+Philosophie du neant, philosophie de la misere, as it used to term
+the laissez faire School, yet retained the worst fallacy of its foe,
+namely, that man was the creature of circumstances; and denied him
+just as much as its antagonist the possession of freewill, or at
+least the right to use freewill on any large scale.
+
+The laissez faire School was certainly the more logical of the two.
+With them, if man was the creature of circumstances, those
+circumstances were at least defined for him by external laws which he
+had not created:  while the Socialists, with Fourier at their head
+(as it has always seemed to me), fell into the extraordinary paradox
+of supposing that though man was the creature of circumstances, he
+was to become happy by creating the very circumstances which were
+afterwards to create him.  But both of them erred, surely, in
+ignoring that self-arbitrating power of man, by which he can, for
+good or for evil, rebel against and conquer circumstance.
+
+I am not, surely, overstepping my province as Professor of History,
+in alluding to this subject.  Just notions of Political Economy are
+absolutely necessary to just notions of History; and I should wish
+those young gentlemen who may attend my Lectures, to go first, were
+it possible, to my more learned brother, the Professor of Political
+Economy, and get from him not merely exact habits of thought, but a
+knowledge which I cannot give, and yet which they ought to possess.
+For to take the very lowest ground, the first fact of history is,
+Bouche va toujours; whatever men have or have not done, they have
+always eaten, or tried to eat; and the laws which regulate the supply
+of the first necessaries of life are, after all, the first which
+should be learnt, and the last which should be ignored.
+
+The more modern school, however, of Political Economy while giving
+due weight to circumstance, has refused to acknowledge it as the
+force which ought to determine all human life; and our greatest
+living political economist has, in his Essay on Liberty, put in a
+plea unequalled since the Areopagitica of Milton, for the self-
+determining power of the individual, and for his right to use that
+power.
+
+But my business is not with rights, so much as with facts; and as a
+fact, surely, one may say, that this inventive reason of man has
+been, in all ages, interfering with any thing like an inevitable
+sequence or orderly progress of humanity.  Some of those writers,
+indeed, who are most anxious to discover an exact order, are most
+loud in their complaints that it has been interfered with by over-
+legislation; and rejoice that mankind is returning to a healthier
+frame of mind, and leaving nature alone to her own work in her own
+way.  I do not altogether agree with their complaints; but of that I
+hope to speak in subsequent lectures.  Meanwhile, I must ask, if (as
+is said) most good legislation now-a-days consists in repealing old
+laws which ought never to have been passed; if (as is said) the great
+fault of our forefathers was that they were continually setting
+things wrong, by intermeddling in matters political, economic,
+religious, which should have been let alone, to develop themselves in
+their own way, what becomes of the inevitable laws, and the
+continuous progress, of the human mind?
+
+Look again at the disturbing power, not merely of the general reason
+of the many, but of the genius of the few.  I am not sure, but that
+the one fact, that genius is occasionally present in the world, is
+not enough to prevent our ever discovering any regular sequence in
+human progress, past or future.
+
+Let me explain myself.  In addition to the infinite variety of
+individual characters continually born (in itself a cause of
+perpetual disturbance), man alone of all species has the faculty of
+producing, from time to time, individuals immeasurably superior to
+the average in some point or other, whom we call men of genius.  Like
+Mr. Babbage's calculating machine, human nature gives millions of
+orderly respectable common-place results, which any statistician can
+classify, and enables hasty philosophers to say--It always has gone
+on thus; it must go on thus always; when behold, after many millions
+of orderly results, there turns up a seemingly disorderly, a
+certainly unexpected, result, and the law seems broken (being really
+superseded by some deeper law) for that once, and perhaps never again
+for centuries.  Even so it is with man, and the physiological laws
+which determine the earthly appearance of men.  Laws there are, doubt
+it not; but they are beyond us:  and let our induction be as wide as
+it may, they will baffle it; and great nature, just as we fancy we
+have found out her secret, will smile in our faces as she brings into
+the world a man, the like of whom we have never seen, and cannot
+explain, define, classify--in one word, a genius.  Such do, as a
+fact, become leaders of men into quite new and unexpected paths, and,
+for good or evil, leave their stamp upon whole generations and races.
+Notorious as this may be, it is just, I think, what most modern
+theories of human progress ignore.  They take the actions and the
+tendencies of the average many, and from them construct their scheme:
+a method not perhaps quite safe were they dealing with plants or
+animals; but what if it be the very peculiarity of this fantastic and
+altogether unique creature called man, not only that he develops,
+from time to time, these exceptional individuals, but that they are
+the most important individuals of all? that his course is decided for
+him not by the average many, but by the extraordinary few; that one
+Mahommed, one Luther, one Bacon, one Napoleon, shall change the
+thoughts and habits of millions?--So that instead of saying that the
+history of mankind is the history of the masses, it would be much
+more true to say, that the history of mankind is the history of its
+great men; and that a true philosophy of history ought to declare the
+laws--call them physical, spiritual, biological, or what we choose--
+by which great minds have been produced into the world, as necessary
+results, each in his place and time.
+
+That would be a science indeed; how far we are as yet from any such,
+you know as well as I.  As yet, the appearance of great minds is as
+inexplicable to us as if they had dropped among us from another
+planet.  Who will tell us why they have arisen when they did, and why
+they did what they did, and nothing else?  I do not deny that such a
+science is conceivable; because each mind, however great or strange,
+may be the result of fixed and unerring laws of life:  and it is
+conceivable, too, that such a science may so perfectly explain the
+past, as to be able to predict the future; and tell men when a fresh
+genius is likely to arise and of what form his intellect will be.
+Conceivable:  but I fear only conceivable; if for no other reason, at
+least for this one.  We may grant safely that the mind of Luther was
+the necessary result of a combination of natural laws.  We may go
+further, and grant, but by no means safely, that Luther, was the
+creature of circumstances, that there was no self-moving originality
+in him, but that his age made him what he was.  To some modern minds
+these concessions remove all difficulty and mystery:  but not, I
+trust, to our minds.  For does not the very puzzle de quo agitur
+remain equally real; namely, why the average of Augustine monks, the
+average of German men, did not, by being exposed to the same average
+circumstances as Luther, become what Luther was?  But whether we
+allow Luther to have been a person with an originally different
+character from all others, or whether we hold him to have been the
+mere puppet of outside influences, the first step towards discovering
+how he became what he was, will be to find out what he was.  It will
+be more easy, and, I am sorry to say, more common to settle
+beforehand our theory, and explain by it such parts of Luther as will
+fit it; and call those which will not fit it hard names.  History is
+often so taught, and the method is popular and lucrative.  But we
+here shall be of opinion, I am sure, that we only can learn causes
+through their effects; we can only learn the laws which produced
+Luther, by learning Luther himself; by analyzing his whole character;
+by gauging all his powers; and that--unless the less can comprehend
+the greater--we cannot do till we are more than Luther himself.  I
+repeat it.  None can comprehend a man, unless he be greater than that
+man.  He must be not merely equal to him, because none can see in
+another elements of character which he has not already seen in
+himself:  he must be greater; because to comprehend him thoroughly,
+he must be able to judge the man's failings as well as his
+excellencies; to see not only why he did what he did, but why he did
+not do more:  in a word, he must be nearer than his object is to the
+ideal man.
+
+And if it be assumed that I am quibbling on the words 'comprehend'
+and 'greater,' that the observer need be greater only potentially,
+and not in act; that all the comprehension required of him, is to
+have in himself the germs of other men's faculties, without having
+developed those germs in life; I must still stand to my assertion.
+For such a rejoinder ignores the most mysterious element of all
+character, which we call strength:  by virtue of which, of two
+seemingly similar characters, while one does nothing, the other shall
+do great things; while in one the germs of intellect and virtue
+remain comparatively embryonic, passive, and weak, in the other these
+same germs shall develop into manhood, action, success.  And in what
+that same strength consists, not even the dramatic imagination of a
+Shakespeare could discover.  What are those heart-rending sonnets of
+his, but the confession that over and above all his powers he lacked
+one thing, and knew not what it was, or where to find it--and that
+was--to be strong?
+
+And yet he who will give us a science of great men, must begin by
+having a larger heart, a keener insight, a more varying human
+experience, than Shakespeare's own; while those who offer us a
+science of little men, and attempt to explain history and progress by
+laws drawn from the average of mankind, are utterly at sea the moment
+they come in contact with the very men whose actions make the
+history, to whose thought the progress is due.  And why?  Because (so
+at least I think) the new science of little men can be no science at
+all:  because the average man is not the normal man, and never yet
+has been; because the great man is rather the normal man, as
+approaching more nearly than his fellows to the true 'norma' and
+standard of a complete human character; and therefore to pass him by
+as a mere irregular sport of nature, an accidental giant with six
+fingers and six toes, and to turn to the mob for your theory of
+humanity, is (I think) about as wise as to ignore the Apollo and the
+Theseus, and to determine the proportions of the human figure from a
+crowd of dwarfs and cripples.
+
+No, let us not weary ourselves with narrow theories, with hasty
+inductions, which will, a century hence, furnish mere matter for a
+smile.  Let us confine ourselves, at least in the present infantile
+state of the anthropologic sciences, to facts; to ascertaining
+honestly and patiently the thing which has been done; trusting that
+if we make ourselves masters of them, some rays of inductive light
+will be vouchsafed to us from Him who truly comprehends mankind, and
+knows what is in man, because He is the Son of Man; who has His own
+true theory of human progress, His own sound method of educating the
+human race, perfectly good, and perfectly wise, and at last,
+perfectly victorious; which nevertheless, were it revealed to us to-
+morrow, we could not understand; for if he who would comprehend
+Luther must be more than Luther, what must he be, who would
+comprehend God?
+
+Look again, as a result of the disturbing force of genius, at the
+effects of great inventions--how unexpected, complex, subtle, all but
+miraculous--throwing out alike the path of human history, and the
+calculations of the student.  If physical discoveries produced only
+physical or economic results--if the invention of printing had only
+produced more books, and more knowledge--if the invention of
+gunpowder had only caused more or less men to be killed--if the
+invention of the spinning-jenny had only produced more cotton-stuffs,
+more employment, and therefore more human beings,--then their effects
+would have been, however complex, more or less subjects of exact
+computation.
+
+But so strangely interwoven is the physical and spiritual history of
+man, that material inventions produce continually the most unexpected
+spiritual results.  Printing becomes a religious agent, causes not
+merely more books, but a Protestant Reformation; then again, through
+the Jesuit literature, helps to a Romanist counter-reformation; and
+by the clashing of the two, is one of the great causes of the Thirty
+Years' War, one of the most disastrous checks which European progress
+ever suffered.  Gunpowder, again, not content with killing men,
+becomes unexpectedly a political agent; 'the villanous saltpetre,' as
+Ariosto and Shakespeare's fop complain, 'does to death many a goodly
+gentleman,' and enables the masses to cope, for the first time, with
+knights in armour; thus forming a most important agent in the rise of
+the middle classes; while the spinning-jenny, not content with
+furnishing facts for the political economist, and employment for
+millions, helps to extend slavery in the United States, and gives
+rise to moral and political questions, which may have, ere they be
+solved, the most painful consequences to one of the greatest nations
+on earth.
+
+So far removed is the sequence of human history from any thing which
+we can call irresistible or inevitable.  Did one dare to deal in
+epithets, crooked, wayward, mysterious, incalculable, would be those
+which would rather suggest themselves to a man looking steadily not
+at a few facts here and there, and not again at some hasty bird's-eye
+sketch, which he chooses to call a whole, but at the actual whole,
+fact by fact, step by step, and alas! failure by failure, and crime
+by crime.
+
+Understand me, I beg.  I do not wish (Heaven forbid!) to discourage
+inductive thought; I do not wish to undervalue exact science.  I only
+ask that the moral world, which is just as much the domain of
+inductive science as the physical one, be not ignored; that the
+tremendous difficulties of analyzing its phenomena be fairly faced;
+and the hope given up, at least for the present, of forming any exact
+science of history; and I wish to warn you off from the too common
+mistake of trying to explain the mysteries of the spiritual world by
+a few roughly defined physical laws (for too much of our modern
+thought does little more than that); and of ignoring as old
+fashioned, or even superstitious, those great moral laws of history,
+which are sanctioned by the experience of ages.
+
+Foremost among them stands a law which I must insist on, boldly and
+perpetually, if I wish (as I do wish) to follow in the footsteps of
+Sir James Stephen:  a law which man has been trying in all ages, as
+now, to deny, or at least to ignore; though he might have seen it if
+he had willed, working steadily in all times and nations.  And that
+is--that as the fruit of righteousness is wealth and peace, strength
+and honour; the fruit of unrighteousness is poverty and anarchy,
+weakness and shame.  It is an ancient doctrine, and yet one ever
+young.  The Hebrew prophets preached it long ago, in words which are
+fulfilling themselves around us every day, and which no new
+discoveries of science will abrogate, because they express the great
+root-law, which disobeyed, science itself cannot get a hearing.
+
+For not upon mind, gentlemen, not upon mind, but upon morals, is
+human welfare founded.  The true subjective history of man is the
+history not of his thought, but of his conscience; the true objective
+history of man is not that of his inventions, but of his vices and
+his virtues.  So far from morals depending upon thought, thought, I
+believe, depends on morals.  In proportion as a nation is righteous,-
+-in proportion as common justice is done between man and man, will
+thought grow rapidly, securely, triumphantly; will its discoveries be
+cheerfully accepted, and faithfully obeyed, to the welfare of the
+whole commonweal.  But where a nation is corrupt, that is, where the
+majority of individuals in it are bad, and justice is not done
+between man and man, there thought will wither, and science will be
+either crushed by frivolity and sensuality, or abused to the ends of
+tyranny, ambition, profligacy, till she herself perishes, amid the
+general ruin of all good things; as she had done in Greece, in Rome,
+in Spain, in China, and many other lands.  Laws of economy, of
+polity, of health, of all which makes human life endurable, may be
+ignored and trampled under foot, and are too often, every day, for
+the sake of present greed, of present passion; self-interest may
+become, and will become, more and more blinded, just in proportion as
+it is not enlightened by virtue; till a nation may arrive, though,
+thank God, but seldom, at that state of frantic recklessness which
+Salvian describes among his Roman countrymen in Gaul, when, while the
+Franks were thundering at their gates, and starved and half-burnt
+corpses lay about the unguarded streets, the remnant, like that in
+doomed Jerusalem of old, were drinking, dicing, ravishing, robbing
+the orphan and the widow, swindling the poor man out of his plot of
+ground, and sending meanwhile to the tottering Caesar at Rome, to
+ask, not for armies, but for Circensian games.
+
+We cannot see how science could have bettered those poor Gauls.  And
+we can conceive, surely, a nation falling into the same madness, and
+crying 'Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die,' in the midst of
+railroads, spinning-jennies, electric telegraphs, and crystal
+palaces, with infinite blue-books and scientific treatises ready to
+prove to them, what they knew perfectly well already, that they were
+making a very unprofitable investment, both of money and of time.
+
+For science indeed is great:  but she is not the greatest.  She is an
+instrument, and not a power; beneficent or deadly, according as she
+is wielded by the hand of virtue or of vice.  But her lawful
+mistress, the only one which can use her aright, the only one under
+whom she can truly grow, and prosper, and prove her divine descent,
+is Virtue, the likeness of Almighty God.  This, indeed, the Hebrew
+Prophets, who knew no science in one sense of the word, do not
+expressly say:  but it is a corollary from their doctrine, which we
+may discover for ourselves, if we will look at the nations round us
+now, if we will look at all the nations which have been.  Even
+Voltaire himself acknowledged that; and when he pointed to the
+Chinese as the most prosperous nation upon earth, ascribed their
+prosperity uniformly to their virtue.  We now know that he was wrong
+in fact:  for we have discovered that Chinese civilization is one not
+of peace and plenty, but of anarchy and wretchedness.  But that fact
+only goes to corroborate the belief, which (strange juxtaposition!)
+was common to Voltaire and the old Hebrew Prophets at whom he
+scoffed, namely, that virtue is wealth, and vice is ruin.  For we
+have found that these Chinese, the ruling classes of them at least,
+are an especially unrighteous people; rotting upon the rotting
+remnants of the wisdom and virtue of their forefathers, which now
+live only on their lips in flowery maxims about justice and mercy and
+truth, as a cloak for practical hypocrisy and villany; and we have
+discovered also, as a patent fact, just what the Hebrew Prophets
+would have foretold us--that the miseries and horrors which are now
+destroying the Chinese Empire, are the direct and organic results of
+the moral profligacy of its inhabitants.
+
+I know no modern nation, moreover, which illustrates so forcibly as
+China the great historic law which the Hebrew Prophets proclaim; and
+that is this:- That as the prosperity of a nation is the correlative
+of their morals, so are their morals the correlative of their
+theology.  As a people behaves, so it thrives; as it believes, so it
+behaves.  Such as his Gods are, such will the man be; down to that
+lowest point which too many of the Chinese seem to have reached,
+where, having no Gods, he himself becomes no man; but (as I hear you
+see him at the Australian diggings) abhorred for his foul crimes even
+by the scum of Europe.
+
+I do not say that the theology always produces the morals, any more
+than that the morals always produce the theology.  Each is, I think,
+alternately cause and effect.  Men make the Gods in their own
+likeness; then they copy the likeness they have set up.  But
+whichever be cause, and whichever effect, the law, I believe, stands
+true, that on the two together depends the physical welfare of a
+people.  History gives us many examples, in which superstition, many
+again in which profligacy, have been the patent cause of a nation's
+deoradation.  It does not, as far as I am aware, give us a single
+case of a nation's thriving and developing when deeply infected with
+either of those two vices.
+
+These, the broad and simple laws of moral retribution, we may see in
+history; and (I hope) something more than them; something of a
+general method, something of an upward progress, though any thing but
+an irresistible or inevitable one.  For I have not argued that there
+is no order, no progress--God forbid.  Were there no order to be
+found, what could the student with a man's reason in him do, but in
+due time go mad?--Were there no progress, what could the student with
+a man's heart within him do, but in due time break his heart, over
+the sight of a chaos of folly and misery irredeemable?--I only argue
+that the order and the progress of human history cannot be similar to
+those which govern irrational beings, and cannot (without extreme
+danger) be described by metaphors (for they are nothing stronger)
+drawn from physical science.  If there be an order, a progress, they
+must be moral; fit for the guidance of moral beings; limited by the
+obedience which those moral beings pay to what they know.
+
+And such an order, such a progress as that, I have good hope that we
+shall find in history.
+
+We shall find, as I believe, in all the ages, God educating man;
+protecting him till he can go alone, furnishing him with the primary
+necessaries, teaching him, guiding him, inspiring him, as we should
+do to our children; bearing with him, and forgiving him too, again
+and again, as we should do:  but teaching him withal (as we shall do
+if we be wise) in great part by his own experience, making him test
+for himself, even by failure and pain, the truth of the laws which
+have been given him; discover for himself, as much as possible, fresh
+laws, or fresh applications of laws; and exercising his will and
+faculties, by trusting him to himself wherever he can be trusted
+without his final destruction.  This is my conception of history,
+especially of Modern History--of history since the Revelation of our
+Lord Jesus Christ.  I express myself feebly enough, I know.  And even
+could I express what I mean perfectly, it would still be but a
+partial analogy, not to be pushed into details.  As I said just now,
+were the true law of human progress revealed to us to-morrow, we
+could not understand it.
+
+For suppose that the theory were true, which Dr. Temple of Rugby has
+lately put into such noble words:  suppose that, as he says, 'The
+power whereby the present ever gathers into itself the results of the
+past, transforms the human race into a colossal man, whose life
+reaches from the creation to the day of judgment.  The successive
+generations of men, are days in this man's life.  The discoveries and
+inventions which characterize the different epochs of the world, are
+this man's works.  The creeds and doctrines, the opinions and
+principles of the successive ages, are his thoughts.  The state of
+society at different times, are his manners.  He grows in knowledge,
+in self-control, in visible size, just as we do.'  Suppose all this;
+and suppose too, that God is educating this his colossal child, as we
+educate our own children; it will hardly follow from thence that his
+education would be, as Dr. Temple says it is, precisely similar to
+ours.
+
+Analogous it may be, but not precisely similar; and for this reason:
+That the collective man, in the theory, must be infinitely more
+complex in his organization than the individuals of which he is
+composed.  While between the educator of the one and of the other,
+there is simply the difference between a man and God.  How much more
+complex then must his education be! how all-inscrutable to human
+minds much in it!--often as inscrutable as would our training of our
+children seem to the bird brooding over her young ones in the nest.
+The parental relations in all three cases may be--the Scriptures say
+that they are--expansions of the same great law; the key to all
+history may be contained in those great words--'How often would I
+have gathered thy children as a hen gathereth her chickens under her
+wings.'  Yet even there the analogy stops short--'but thou wouldest
+not' expresses a new element, which has no place in the training of
+the nestling by the dam, though it has place in our training of our
+children; even that self-will, that power of disobedience, which is
+the dark side of man's prerogative as a rational and self-cultivating
+being.  Here that analogy fails, as we should have expected it to do;
+and in a hundred other points it fails, or rather transcends so
+utterly its original type, that mankind seems, at moments, the mere
+puppet of those laws of natural selection, and competition of
+species, of which we have heard so much of late; and, to give a
+single instance, the seeming waste, of human thought, of human agony,
+of human power, seems but another instance of that inscrutable
+prodigality of nature, by which, of a thousand acorns dropping to the
+ground, but one shall become the thing it can become, and grow into a
+builder oak, the rest be craunched up by the nearest swine.
+
+Yet these dark passages of human life may be only necessary elements
+of the complex education of our race; and as much mercy under a
+fearful shape, as ours when we put the child we love under the
+surgeon's knife.  At least we may believe so; believe that they have
+a moral end, though that end be unseen by us; and without any rash or
+narrow prying into final causes (a trick as fatal to historic
+research as Bacon said it was to science), we may justify God by
+faith, where we cannot justify Him by experience.
+
+Surely this will be the philosophic method.  If we seem to ourselves
+to have discovered a law, we do not throw it away the moment we find
+phaenomena which will not be explained by it.  We use those
+phaenomena to correct and to expand our law.  And this belief that
+History is 'God educating man,' is no mere hypothesis; it results
+from the observation of thousands of minds, throughout thousands of
+years.  It has long seemed--I trust it will seem still--the best
+explanation of the strange deeds of that strange being, man:  and
+where we find in history facts which seem to contradict it, we shall
+not cast away rashly or angrily either it or them:  but if we be
+Bacon's true disciples, we shall use them patiently and reverently to
+correct and expand our notions of the law itself, and rise thereby to
+more deep and just conceptions of education, of man, and--it may be--
+of God Himself.
+
+In proportion as we look at history thus; searching for effective,
+rather than final causes, and content to see God working everywhere,
+without impertinently demanding of Him a reason for His deeds, we
+shall study in a frame of mind equally removed from superstition on
+the one hand, and necessitarianism on the other.  We shall not be
+afraid to confess natural agencies:  but neither shall we be afraid
+to confess those supernatural causes which underlie all existence,
+save God's alone.
+
+We shall talk of more than of an over-ruling Providence.  That such
+exists, will seem to us a patent fact.  But it will seem to us
+somewhat Manichaean to believe that the world is ill made, mankind a
+failure, and that all God has to do with them, is to set them right
+here and there, when they go intolerably wrong.  We shall believe not
+merely in an over-ruling Providence, but (if I may dare to coin a
+word) in an under-ruling one, which has fixed for mankind eternal
+laws of life, health, growth, both physical and spiritual; in an
+around-ruling Providence, likewise, by which circumstances, that
+which stands around a man, are perpetually arranged, it may be, are
+fore-ordained, so that each law shall have at least an opportunity of
+taking effect on the right person, in the right time and place; and
+in an in-ruling Providence. too, from whose inspiration comes all
+true thought, all right feeling; from whom, we must believe, man
+alone of all living things known to us inherits that mysterious
+faculty of perceiving the law beneath the phaenomena, by virtue of
+which he is a MAN.
+
+But we can hold all this, surely, and equally hold all which natural
+science may teach us.  Hold what natural science teaches?  We shall
+not dare not to hold it.  It will be sacred in our eyes.  All light
+which science, political, economic, physiological, or other, can
+throw upon the past, will be welcomed by us, as coming from the
+Author of all light.  To ignore it, even to receive it suspiciously
+and grudgingly, we shall feel to be a sin against Him.  We shall
+dread no 'inroads of materialism;' because we shall be standing upon
+that spiritual ground which underlies--ay, causes--the material.  All
+discoveries of science, whether political or economic, whether laws
+of health or laws of climate, will be accepted trustfully and
+cheerfully.  And when we meet with such startling speculations as
+those on the influence of climate, soil, scenery on national
+character, which have lately excited so much controversy, we shall
+welcome them at first sight, just because they give us hope of order
+where we had seen only disorder, law where we fancied chance:  we
+shall verify them patiently; correct them if they need correction;
+and if proven, believe that they have worked, and still work, [Greek
+text which cannot be reproduced], as factors in the great method of
+Him who has appointed to all nations their times, and the bounds of
+their habitation, if haply they might feel after Him, and find Him:
+though He be not far from any one of them; for in Him we live, and
+move, and have our being, and are the offspring of God Himself.
+
+I thus end what it seemed to me proper to say in this, my Inaugural
+Lecture; thanking you much for the patience with which you have heard
+me:  and if I have in it too often spoken of myself, and my own
+opinions, I can only answer that it is a fault which has been forced
+on me by my position, and which will not occur again.  It seemed to
+me that some sort of statement of my belief was necessary, if only
+from respect to a University from which I have been long separated,
+and to return to which is to me a high honour and a deep pleasure;
+and I cannot but be aware (it is best to be honest) that there exists
+a prejudice against me in the minds of better men than I am, on
+account of certain early writings of mine.  That prejudice, I trust,
+with God's help, I shall be able to dissipate.  At least whatever I
+shall fail in doing, this University will find that I shall do one
+thing; and that is, obey the Apostolic precept, 'Study to be quiet,
+and to do your own business.'
+
+
+
+
+Footnotes:
+
+{p1}  Grimm, Grammatik, ii. p. 516.
+
+{p2}  See Grimm, Grammatik, (2nd edit.) vol. i. p. 108; vol. ii. p.
+581.
+
+{p3}  Lectures on the Science of Language, vol. ii. p. 232.
+
+{p4}  Forstemann mentions a Latin inscription of the third century
+found near Wiesbaden with the Dative Toutiorigi.
+
+{p5}  German classics, by M. M. p. 12.
+
+{p6}  Anonym.  Valesian. ad calcem Ann.  Marcellin. p. 722.  Gibbon,
+cap. xxxix; now known, through Mommsen, as the Annals of Ravenna.
+
+{p7}  Grimm thinks that Charle-maigne and Charlemagne were originally
+corruptions of Karlo-man, and were interpreted later as Carolus
+magnus.  Grimm, Grammatik, ii. 462; iii. 320.
+
+{p8}  Weber, Lehrbuch der Weltgeschichte, s 245:  'Bei Verona von
+Theoderich (daher Dietrich von Bern) besiegt, barg sich Odoaker
+hinter die Mauern von Ravenna.'  It is much more objectionable when
+Simrock in his translation of the Edda renders Thjodrekr by Dietrich,
+though he retains Theodolf and similar names.  But it shows at the
+same time the wide popularity of that name.
+
+{p9}  Grimm, Heldensage, p. 344.
+
+{p10}  Gibbon, chap. xxxix. sub fin.
+
+{p11}  Otto von Freising, in the first half of the twelfth century
+(Chronicon 5, 3), takes the opposite view, and thinks the fable
+derived from history:  'Ob ea non multis post diebus, xxx imperii sui
+anno, subitanea morte rapitur ac juxta beati Gregorii dialogum (4,
+36) a Joanne et Symmacho in Aetnam praecipitatus, a quodam homine Dei
+cernitur.  Hinc puto fabulam illam traductam, qua vulgo dicitur:
+Theodoricus vivus equo sedens ad inferos descendit.
+
+{p12}  Grimm, Deutsche Heldensage, p. 36.  Chronicon Urspergense,
+85a:  Haec Jordanis quidam grammaticus, ex eorundem stirpe Gothorum
+progenitus, de Getarum origine et Amalorum nobilitate non omnia, quae
+de eis scribuntur et referuntur, ut ipse dicit, complexus exaravit,
+sed brevius pro rerum notitia huic opusculo inseruimus.  His
+perlectis diligenterque perspectis perpendat, qui discernere noverit,
+quomodo illud ratum teneatur, quod non solum vulgarifabulatione et
+cantilenarum modulatione usitatur, verum etiam in quibusdam chronicis
+annotatur; scilicet quod Hermenricus tempore Martiani principis super
+omnes Gothos regnaverit, et Theodoricum Dietmari filium, patruelem
+suum, ut dicunt, instimulante Odoacre, item, ut ajunt, patruele suo
+de Verona pulsum, apud Attilam Hunorum regem exulare coegerit, cum
+historiographus narret, Ermenricum regem Gothorum multis regibus
+dominantem tempore Valentiniani et Valentis fratrum regnasse et a
+duobus fratribus Saro et Ammio, quos conjicimus eos fuisse, qui
+vulgariter Sarelo et Hamidiecus dicuntur, vulneratum in primordio
+egressionis Hunorum per Maeotidem paludem, quibus rex fuit Valamber,
+tam vulneris quam Hunorum irruptionis dolore defunctum fuisse,
+Attilam vero postea ultra LXX annos sub Martiano et Valentiniano cum
+Romanis et Wisigothis Aetioque duce Romanorum pugnasse et sub eisdem
+principibus regno vitaque decessisse. . . . Hinc rerum diligens
+inspector perpendat, quomodo Ermenricus Theodoricum Dietmari filium
+apud Attilam exulare coegerit, cum juxta hunc historiographum
+contemporalis ejus non fuit.  Igitur aut hic falsa conscripsit, aut
+vulgaris opinio fallitur et fallit, aut alius Ermenricus et alms
+Theodoricus dandi sunt Attilae contemporanei, in quibus hujus modi
+rerum convenientia rata possit haberi.  Hic enim Ermenricus longe
+ante Attilam legitur defunctus.
+
+{p13}  Chronicon, 5, 3:  Quod autem rursum narrant, eum Hermanarico
+Attilaeque contemporaneum fuisse, omnino stare non potest, dum
+Attilam longe post Hermanaricum constat exercuisse tyrannidem
+istumque post mortem Attilae octennem a patre obsidem Leoni Augusto
+traditum.
+
+{p14}  Chronicon, 16, 481:  Quod autem quidam dicunt, ipsum
+Theodoricum fuisse Hermenrico Veronensi et Attilae contemporaneum,
+non est verum.  Constat enim Attilam longe post Hermenricum fuisse
+Theodoricum etiam longe post mortem Attilae, quum esset puer
+octennis, Leoni imperatori in obsidem datum fuisse.
+
+{p19}  The early romancers, and especially Achilles Tatius, give
+pictures of Roman praedial slavery too painful to quote.  Roman
+domestic slavery is not to be described by the pen of an Englishman.
+And I must express my sorrow, that in the face of such notorious
+facts, some have of late tried to prove American slavery to be as bad
+as, or even worse than, that of Rome.  God forbid!  Whatsoever may
+have been the sins of the Southern gentleman, he is at least a
+Teuton, and not a Roman; a whole moral heaven above the effeminate
+wretch, who in the 4th and 5th centuries called himself a senator and
+a clarissimus.
+
+{p101}  Dr. Sheppard, p. 297.
+
+{p109}  Had he actually taken the name of Theodoric, Theuderic,
+Dietrich, which signifies much the same thing as 'King of nations'?
+
+{p158}  With west-countrymen, to 'scrattle' still means to scramble,
+or shuffle about.
+
+{162}  English Language, vol. i. p. 200.
+
+{p214}  Cf. Montalembert.  'Moines d'Occident.'
+
+{p279}  Sismondi Hist. de la Chute de l'Empire Romain, p. 187.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg Etext of Roman and the Teuton, by Charles Kingsley
+
diff --git a/old/rmtut10.zip b/old/rmtut10.zip
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..1aac994
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/rmtut10.zip