manner? What is the ideal powerful enough to make the
hazard of a nation's death preferable to the abandonment of that ideal?
The nation which sent its bravest to die at Al-Kasr al Kebir[11] is not
a nation of adventurers. Nor do the instances of Phocaea, of the
Cimbri, or the Ostrogoths afford any analogy here. Dom Sebastian's
device fits not only his own career but the history of the race of
which at that epoch he was at once the king and the ideal hero--"A
glorious death makes the whole life glorious." And the genius of the
nation sanctioned his life and his heroic death. To Portugal Dom
Sebastian became such a figure as Frederick Barbarossa, dead on the
far-off crusade, had been to the Middle Age, and for two centuries,
whenever night thickened around the fortunes of the race, the spirit of
Dom Sebastian returned to illumine the gloom, showing himself to a few
faithful ones; and in very truth the spirit of his deeds and of their
fathers never died in the hearts of the Portuguese, inspiring whatever
is memorable in their later history.

Spain completes in the expulsion of the Moors the warfare, the Crusade,
which began with Pelayo and the remnant of the Visigoths. Spain, as
Spain, could not act otherwise, could not act as Germany acted, as
England acted. Venice, so far from abandoning the faith of the
Nazarene, as Ruskin fancied, barred of her commerce, seeing her power
pass to Portugal, did yet, solitary and unaided, face the Ottoman, and
for two generations made the Crusades live again. It is another
Venice, yet religion is not the cause of that otherness. She defies
Paul V in the name of freedom, in the days of Sarpi,[12] as she had
defied Innocent III in the name of empire in the days of Dandolo.

Hellas still lives, still forms an element, vitalizing and omnipresent,
in the life of States and in human destiny. Roman grandeur is not dead
whilst Sulla, Tacitus, Montesquieu, Machiavelli survive. To Petrarch
the Rome of the Scipios is more present than the Rome of the Colonnas,
and it numbers among its citizens Byron, Goethe, and Leopardi.

For like all great empires Rome strove not for herself but for
humanity, and dying, had yet strength, by her laws, her religion, her
language, to impart her spirit and the secret of her peace to other
races and to other times. In the world's _palaestra_ she had thrown
the _discus_ to a point which the empires that come after, dowered as
Rome was dowered, and by kind