over all the central
provinces of the empire, taking aspects more or less refined, according
to its proximity to the seats of government; dependent for all its power
on the vigor and freshness of the religion which animated it; and as
that vigor and purity departed, losing its own vitality, and sinking
into nerveless rest, not deprived of its beauty, but benumbed and
incapable of advance or change.

Sec. XXII. Meantime there had been preparation for its renewal. While in
Rome and Constantinople, and in the districts under their immediate
influence, this Roman art of pure descent was practised in all its
refinement, an impure form of it--a patois of Romanesque--was carried by
inferior workmen into distant provinces; and still ruder imitations of
this patois were executed by the barbarous nations on the skirts of the
empire. But these barbarous nations were in the strength of their youth;
and while, in the centre of Europe, a refined and purely descended art
was sinking into graceful formalism, on its confines a barbarous and
borrowed art was organising itself into strength and consistency. The
reader must therefore consider the history of the work of the period as
broadly divided into two great heads: the one embracing the elaborately
languid succession of the Christian art of Rome; and the other, the
imitations of it executed by nations in every conceivable phase of early
organisation, on the edges of the empire, or included in its now merely
nominal extent.

Sec. XXIII. Some of the barbaric nations were, of course, not susceptible
of this influence; and when they burst over the Alps, appear, like the
Huns, as scourges only, or mix, as the Ostrogoths, with the enervated
Italians, and give physical strength to the mass with which they mingle,
without materially affecting its intellectual character. But others,
both south and north of the empire, had felt its influence, back to the
beach of the Indian Ocean on the one hand, and to the ice creeks of the
North Sea on the other. On the north and west the influence was of the
Latins; on the south and east, of the Greeks. Two nations, pre-eminent
above all the rest, represent to us the force of derived mind on either
side. As the central power is eclipsed, the orbs of reflected light
gather into their fulness; and when sensuality and idolatry had done
their work, and the religion of the empire was laid asleep in a
glittering sepulchre, the living light rose upon both horizons