ints, one of whom, you might think, might have been lured down
to the beach and the perilous proximity of water for the
occasion. But let it pass!

Ten years later the Law began to marshal its armies seriously for
the destruction of an obsolete world. The Huns crossed the Volga,
and fell upon the Ostrogoths, who had had a Middle-European
empire up through Austria and Germany. The Ostrogoths, somewhat
flattened out, joined with the Huns to fall upon the Visigoths;
who theeupon poured down through the Balkans to fall upon
the Romans; and defeated and killed the emperor Valens at
Adianople in 378. Theodosius, from 379 to 395, held precariously
together a frontier cracking and bulging all along the line as it
had never cracked and bulged before. When he died, the empire
finally split: of his two sons, Arcadius taking the East,
Honorius the West.

In Honorius' half, from now on it is a record of ruin hurrying on
the footsteps of ruin. Ended the quiet _otium cum dignitate_ of
the great country gentlemen; the sterile culture, the somewhat
puritan morality, the placid refined life we read of in Ausonius.
You shall see now the well-ordered estate laid waste;--the
peasants killed or hiding in the woods;--the mansion smashed, and
its elegant furniture;--the squire, the kindly-severe religious
matron his mother the young wife,--gracious lady of the house,--
and the bonny children:--they are hacked corpses lying at random
in the wrecked salons, or in the trampled garden where my lady's
flowers now grow wild. The land went out of cultivation; the
populace, what remained of it, crowded into the walled cities,
there to frowse in mental and physical stuffiness until the
Middle Ages were passed,--or else took to the wilds under any
vigorous mind, and became bandits. The open country was all
trodden down by wave after wave of marauding, murdering,
beer-swilling, turbulent giants from the north,--or by the still
more dreaded dwarfish horsemen whose forefathers Pan Chow had
driven long since out of Asia. They poured down into Greece;
they, poured down through Gaul and Spain into Africa; into Italy;
host after host of them;--civilization was a pathetic sand-castle
washed over and over by ruining seas. Rome, indeed, could still
command generals at times: Stilicho, Aetius, and afterwards
Belisarius and Narses; but they were all pitiful Partingtons
swishing their mops round against a most ugly Atlantic. In 410
Rome itself was