great trends, but hides under the record
of innumerable fidgety details the real meanings of things. Mr.
Stobart, with a gift of his own for taking large views, sees this
clearly, and goes about to remedy it; he does not wander with
you through the dark of the undergrowth, labeling bush after
bush; but leads you from eminence to eminence, generalizing, and
giving you to understand the broad lie of the land: he makes you
see the forest in spite of the trees. As this is our purpose,
too, we shall beg leave to go with him; only adding now and
again such new light as Theosophical ideas throw on it;--and for
the most part, to avoid a tautology of acknowledgments, or a
plethora of footnotes in the PATH presently, letting this one
confession of debt serve. The learning, the pictures, the
marshaling of facts, are all Mr. Stobart's.

In the fifth and sixth centuries A. D., when the old manvantara
was closing, Europe was flung into the Cauldron of Regeneration.
Nations and fragments of nations were thrown in and tossing and
seething; the broth of them was boiling over, and,--just as the
the Story of Taliesin, flooding the world with poison and
destruction: and all that a new order of ages might in due time
come into being. One result that a miscellany of racial
heterogeneities was washed up into the peninsular and island
extremities of the continent. In the British you had four Celtic
and a Pictish remnant,--not to mention Latins galore,--pressed on
by three or four sorts of Teutons. In Spain, though it was less
an extremity of Europe than a highway into Africa, you had a fine
assortment of odds and ends: Suevi, Vandals, Goths and what not;
superimposed on a more or less homogenized collection of
Iberians, Celts, Phoenicians, and Italians;--and in Italy you had
Italians broken up into numberless fragments, and overrun by all
manner of Lombards, Teutons, Slavs, and Huns. Welded by cyclic
stress, presently first England, then Spain, and lastly Italy,
became nations; in all three varying degrees of homogeneity
being attained. But the next peninsula, the Balkan, has so far
reached no unity at all; it remains to this day a curious museum
of racial oddments, to the sorrow of European peace; and each
of them represents some people strong in its day, and perhaps
even cultured.

What the Balkan peninsula has been in our own time, the Apennine
peninsula was after the fall of Rome, and also before the rise of
Rome: a job-