n did not) mounted upon skates, and skated away into an
azure infinite of distance (quite forgetting her throat), so as to--do
what? It is really frightful to mention: so as to come safe and sound
into the nineteenth century, leaping into the centre of us all like the
ghost of a patriarch, setting her arms a-kimbo, and crying out: 'Here I
come from a thousand years before Homer.' All this is really true and
undeniable. It is past contradiction, what Mr. Finlay says, that Greece,
having weathered the following peoples, to wit, the Romans; secondly,
the vagabonds who persecuted the Romans for five centuries; thirdly, the
Saracens; fourthly and fifthly, the Ottoman Turks and Venetians;
sixthly, the Latin princes of Constantinople--not to speak seventhly and
eighthly of Albanian or Egyptian Ali Pashas, or ninthly, of Joseph Humes
and Greek loans, is now, viz., in March, 1844, alive and kicking. Think
of a man, reader, at a _soiree_ in the heavenly spring of '44 (for
heavenly it _will_ be), wearing white kid gloves, and descended from
Deucalion or Ogyges!

Amongst the great changes wrought in every direction by Constantine, it
is not to be supposed that Mr. Finlay could overlook those which applied
a new organization to the army. Rome would not be Rome; even a product
of Rome would not be legitimate; even an offshoot from Rome would be of
suspicious derivation, which _could_ find that great master-wheel of the
state machinery a secondary force in its system. It is wonderful to mark
the martial destiny of all which inherited, or upon any line descended
from Rome in every age of that mighty evolution. War not barbaric, war
exquisitely systematic, war according to the vigour of all science as
yet published to man, was the talisman by which Rome and the children
of Rome prospered: the S.P.Q.R. on the legionary banners was the sign
set in the rubric of the heavens by which the almighty nation, looking
upwards, read her commission from above: and if ever that sign shall
grow pale, then look for the coming of the end, whispered the prophetic
heart of Rome to herself even from the beginning. But are not all great
kingdoms dependent on their armies? No. Some have always been protected
by their remoteness, many by their adjacencies. Germany, in the first
century from Augustus, retreated into her mighty forests when closely
pressed, and in military phrase 'refused herself' to the pursuer. Persia
sheltered herself under the same tactics