fields of endeavor have now recovered
themselves, and play again a leading part.

In Italy, where history is recorded for a far longer time, the course
of affairs was different. When the Roman Empire that was really Roman
went down in ruin, there followed an interval of centuries when the
gloom was almost unrelieved. Every form of luxury and frivolity, of
contemptuous repugnance for serious work, of enervating
self-indulgence, every form of vice and weakness which we regard as
most ominous in the civilization of to-day, had been at work
throughout Italy for generations. The nation had lost all patriotism.
It had ceased to bring forth fighters or workers, had ceased to bring
forth men of mark of any kind; and the remnant of the Italian people
cowered in helpless misery among the horse-hoofs of the barbarians, as
the wild northern bands rode in to take the land for a prey and the
cities for a spoil. It was one of the great cataclysms of history; but
in the end it was seen that what came had been in part change and
growth. It was not all mere destruction. Not only did Rome leave a
vast heritage of language, culture, law, ideas, to all the modern
world; but the people of Italy kept the old blood as the chief strain
in their veins. In a few centuries came a wonderful new birth for
Italy. Then for four or five hundred years there was a growth of many
little city-states which, in their energy both in peace and war, in
their fierce, fervent life, in the high quality of their men of arts
and letters, and in their utter inability to combine so as to preserve
order among themselves or to repel outside invasion, cannot unfairly
be compared with classic Greece. Again Italy fell, and the land was
ruled by Spaniard or Frenchman or Austrian; and again, in the
nineteenth century, there came for the third time a wonderful new
birth.

Contrast this persistence of the old type in its old home, and in
certain lands which it had conquered, with its utter disappearance in
certain other lands where it was intrusive, but where it at one time
seemed as firmly established as in Italy--certainly as in Spain or
Gaul. No more curious example of the growth and disappearance of a
national type can be found than in the case of the Graeco-Roman
dominion in Western Asia and North Africa. All told it extended over
nearly a thousand years, from the days of Alexander till after the
time of Heraclius. Throughout these lands there yet remain the ruins
of i