ains. Shall Christ, and the Franks, not be
stronger than villainous Visigoths 'who are Arians also'? All his
Franks are with him, in that opinion. So he marches against the
Visigoths, meets them and their Alaric at Poitiers, ends their Alaric
and their Arianism, and carries his faithful Franks to the Pic du
Midi.

And so now you must draw the map of France once more, and put the
fleur-de-lys all over its central mass from Calais to the Pyrenees:
only Brittany still on the west, Burgundy in the east, and the white
Provence rose beyond Rhone. And now poor little Amiens has become a
mere border town like our Durham, and Somme a border streamlet like
our Tyne. Loire and Seine have become the great French rivers, and men
will be minded to build cities by these; where the well-watered
plains, not of peat, but richest pasture, may repose under the guard
of saucy castles on the crags, and moated towers on the islands. But
now let us think a little more closely what our changed symbols in the
map may mean--five fleur-de-lys for level bar.

They don't mean, certainly, that all the Goths are gone, and nobody but
Franks in France? The Franks have not massacred Visigothic man, woman,
and child, from Loire to Garonne. Nay, where their own throne is still
set by the Somme, the peat-bred people whom they found there, live there
still, though subdued. Frank, or Goth, or Roman may fluctuate hither and
thither, in chasing or flying troops: but, unchanged through all the
gusts of war, the rural people whose huts they pillage, whose farms they
ravage, and over whose arts they reign, must still be diligently,
silently, and with no time for lamentation, ploughing, sowing,
cattle-breeding!

Else how could Frank or Hun, Visigoth or Roman, live for a month, or
fight for a day?

Whatever the name, or the manners, of their masters, the ground
delvers must be the same; and the goatherd of the Pyrenees, and the
vine-dresser of Garonne, and the milkmaid of Picardy, give them what
lords you may, abide in their land always, blossoming as the trees of
the field, and enduring as the crags of the desert. And these, the
warp and first substance of the nation, are divided, not by dynasties,
but by climates; and are strong here, and helpless there, by
privileges which no invading tyrants can abolish, and through faults
which no preaching hermit can repress. Now, therefore, please let us
leave our history a minute or two, and read the lessons of constant