d from the Rhine
to Gibraltar; so that when the tide set towards the south again, the
Northmen brought back to Italy some of the spirit and some of the
institutions which Rome had carried northwards to them in the days of
conquest; and they came not altogether as strangers and barbarians, as
the Huns had come, to ravage and destroy, and be themselves destroyed
and scattered and forgotten, but, in a measure, as Europeans against
Europeans, hoping to grasp the remnants of a civilized power. Theodoric
tried to make a real kingdom, Totila and Teias fell fighting for one;
the Franks established one in Gaul, and at last it was a Frank who gave
the Empire life again, and conquests and laws, and was crowned by the
Christian Pontifex Maximus in Rome when Julius Caesar had been dead more
than eight hundred years.

One of the greatest of the world's historians has told the story of the
change, calling it the 'Decline and Fall of the Empire,' and describing
it in some three thousand pages, of which scarcely one can be spared for
the understanding of the whole. Thereby its magnitude may be gauged, but
neither fairly judged nor accurately measured. The man who would grasp
the whole meaning of Rome's name, must spend a lifetime in study and
look forward to disappointment in the end. It was Ampere, I believe, who
told a young student that he might get a superficial impression of the
city in ten years, but that twenty would be necessary in order to know
anything about it worthy to be written. And perhaps the largest part of
the knowledge worth having lies in the change from the ancient capital
of the Empire to the mediaeval seat of ecclesiastic domination.

And, indeed, nothing in all history is more extraordinary than the rise
of Rome's second power under the Popes. In the ordinary course of human
events, great nations appear to have had but one life. When that was
lived out, and when they had passed through the artistic period so often
coincident with early decadence, they were either swept away, or they
sank to the insignificance of mere commercial prosperity, thereafter
deriving their fashions, arts, tastes, and in fact almost everything
except their wealth, from nations far gone in decay.

[Illustration: THE CAMPAGNA

And Ruins of the Claudian Aqueduct]

But in Rome it was otherwise. The growth of the faith which subjected
the civilized world was a matter of first importance to civilization,
and Rome was the centre of that gro