by the
sword." His believers omitted to do either. When enrolled, they deserted.
On the frontiers they refused to fight. The path of the barbarians was
easy. In disorganized hordes they battened on Rome and melted away there
in excesses. Tacitus and Salvian rather flattered them. They were neither
intelligent or noble. They must have lacked even the sense of
independence. They pulled civilization down, but they fell with it--into
serfdom.

Already from the steppes of Tartary had issued cyclones of Huns. Painted
blue, wrapped in cloaks of human skin, it was thought that they were the
whelps of demons. Their chief was Attila. The whirlwind that he loosed
swept the world like a broom. In the echoes of his passage is the crash of
falling cities, the cries of the vanquished, the death rattle of nations,
the surge and roar of seas of blood. In the reverberations Attila looms,
dragging the desert after him, tossing it like a pall on the face of the
earth. "But who are you?" a startled prelate gasped. Said Attila, "I am
the Scourge of God."

Satiated at last, overburdened with the booty of the world, he galloped
back to his lair where, on his wedding couch, another Judith killed him.
In spite of him, in spite of preceding Goths and subsequent Vandals, Rome,
unlike her gods that had fled the skies, was immortal. She could fall, but
she could not die. But though she survived, antiquity was dead. It
departed with the lords of the ghostland.

HISTORIA AMORIS

_Part Two_

PART II

I

THE CLOISTER AND THE HEART

In the making of the world that was Rome, ages combined. Centuries
unrolled in its dissolution. Step by step it had ascended the path of
empire, step by step it went down. The descent completed, Rome herself
survived. The eternal feminine is not more everlasting than the Eternal
City. Yet, in the descent, her power, wrested from a people who had but
the infirmities of corruption, by others that had only the instincts of
brutes, left but vices and ruins. From these feudalism and serfdom
erupted. Humanity became divided into beasts of burden and beasts of prey.

Feudalism was the transmission of authority from an overlord to an
underlord, from the latter to a retainer, and thence down to the lowest
rung of the social ladder, beneath which was the serf, between whom and
his master the one judge was God.

The resulting conditions have no parallel in any epoch of which history
has cognizance. Exc