red ideals fired, must struggle to
surpass, or in this divine antagonism be broken.

For what does the fall of Rome mean, and what are its relations to this
Empire of Britain? In an earlier lecture I illustrated my conception
of the Rome of the fifth century in the similitude of a Goth bending
over a dead Roman, and by the flare of a torch seeking to read on the
still brow the secret of his own destiny. Rome does not die there.
Her genius lives on in the Gothic race, deep, penetrating, and
all-informing, and in the picked valour of that race, which for six
hundred years spends itself in forging England, it is deepest, most
penetrating, and all-informing. Roman definiteness of thought and act
were in that nation touched by mysticism to reverie and compassion.
From the ashes of the dead ideal of concrete justice, imaginative
justice is born. Right becomes righteousness, but the living genius
which was Rome still pulses within it. By the energy of feudalism the
ancient subjection of the individual to the State is challenged.
Freedom is born, but like some winged glory hovering aloft, rivets the
famished eyes of men, till at last, descending by the Rhine, it fills
with its radiance a darkened world. Religious oppression is stayed,
but, Phoenix-like, yet another ideal arises, and generations later,
what a temple is reared for it by the Seine! And now in this era, and
at this latest time, behold in England the glory has once more
alighted, as once for a brief space by the Rhine and Seine, but surely
to make here its lasting mansionry. For in very truth, in all that
freedom and all that justice possess of power towards good amongst men,
is not England as it were earth's central shrine and this race the
vanguard of humanity?

Rome was the synthesis of the empires of the past, of Hellas, of Egypt,
of Assyria. In her purposes their purposes lived. Mediaeval
imperialism strove not to rival Rome but to be Rome. In Britain the
spirit of Empire receives a new incarnation. The form decays, the
divine idea remains, the creative spirit gliding from this to that,
indestructible. And thus the destiny of empires involves the
consideration of the destiny of man.

[1] In Volkmann's edition of Plotinus, the sole attempt at a critical
text worthy of the name that has yet been made, the passage runs as
follows:

[Illustration: Greek text]

[2] Spinoza's answer to the "melancholici qui laudat vitam incultem et
agrestem" (