soul no less than does its sound the ear. When he rises from table the guards for the night are set, and armed men stand at all the doors, to watch him through the first hours of sleep.

H

LECTURE IV.

THE GOTHIC CIVILIZER.

LET us follow the fortunes of Italy and of Rome. They are not only a type of the fortunes of the whole western world, but the fortunes of that world, as you will see, depend on Rome.

You must recollect, meanwhile, that by the middle of the fifth century, the Western Empire had ceased to exist. The Angles and Saxons were fighting their way into Britain. The Franks were settled in north France and the lower Rhineland. South of them, the centre of Gaul still remained Roman, governed by Counts of cities, who were all but independent sovereigns, while they confessed a nominal allegiance to the Emperor of Constantinople. Their power was destined soon to be annihilated by the conquests of Clovis and his Franks-as false and cruel ruffians as their sainted king, the first-born son of the Church. The history of Gaul for some centuries becomes henceforth a tissue of internecine horrors, which you must read for yourselves in the pages of M. Sismondi, or of Gregory of Tours. The Allemanni (whose name has become among the Franks the general name for Germans) held the lands from the Maine to the Rhætian Alps. The

Burgunds, the lands to the south-west of them, comprising the greater part of south-east Gaul. The West Goths held the south-west of Gaul, and the greater part of Spain, having thrust the Sueves, and with them some Alans, into Gallicia, Asturias, and Portugal; and thrust, also, the Vandals across the straits of Gibraltar, to found a prosperous kingdom along the northern shore of Africa. The East Goths, meanwhile, after various wanderings to the north of the Alps, lay in the present Austria and in the Danube lands, resting after their great struggle with the Huns, and their crowning victory of Netad.

To follow the fortunes of Italy, we must follow those of these East Goths, and especially of one man among them, Theodoric, known in German song as Dietrich of Bern or Verona.

Interesting exceedingly to us should this great hero be. No man's history better shows the strange relations between the Teutons and the dying Empire: but more; his life is the first instance of a Teuton attempting to found a civilized and ordered state, upon experience drawn from Roman sources; of the young world trying to build itself up some sort of dwelling out of the ruins of the old. Dietrich failed, it is true. But if the thing had been then possible, he seems to have been the man to have done it. He lived and laboured like what he wasa royal Amal, a true son of Woden. Unable to write, he founded a great kingdom by native virtue and common sense. Called a barbarian, he restored prosperity to ruined Italy, and gave to it (and with it to

But if his life was He failed after all in

the greater part of the western world), peace for three and thirty years. Brought up among hostile sects, he laid down that golden law of religious liberty which the nineteenth century has not yet courage and humanity enough to accept. heroic, his death was tragic. his vast endeavours, from causes hidden from him, but visible, and most instructive, to us; and after having toiled impartially for the good of conquerors and of conquered alike, he died sadly, leaving behind him a people who, most of them, believed gladly the news that a holy hermit had seen his soul hurled down the crater of Stromboli, as a just punishment for the inexpiable crime of being wiser than his generation.

Some have complained of Gibbon's 'hero-worship' of Dietrich-I do not. The honest and accurate cynic so very seldom worshipped a hero, or believed in the existence of any, that we may take his good opinion as almost final and without appeal. One author, for whose opinion I have already exprest a very high respect, says that he was but a wild man. of the woods to the last; polished over skin-deep with Roman civilization; 'Scratch him, and you found the barbarian underneath. It may be true. If it be true, it is a very high compliment. It was not from his Roman civilization, but from his 'barbarian' mother and father, that he drew the 'vive intelligence des choses morales, et ces inspirations élevées et heroïques,' which M. Thierry truly attri1 Dr. Sheppard, p. 297.

butes to him. If there was, as M. Thierry truly says, another nature struggling within him-is there not such in every man? And are not the struggles the more painful, the temptations more dangerous, the inconsistencies too often the more shameful, the capacities for evil as well as for good, more huge, just in proportion to the native force and massiveness of the soul? The doctrine may seem dangerous. It is dangerous, like many truths; and woe to those who, being unlearned and unstable, wrest it to their own destruction; and presume upon it to indulge their own passions under Byronic excuses of 'genius,' or 'muscular Christianity.' But it is true nevertheless so at least the Bible tells us, in its wonderful delineations of David, 'the man after God's own heart,' and of St. Peter, the chief of the apostles. And there are points of likeness between the character of Dietrich, and that of David, which will surely suggest themselves to any acute student of human nature. M. Thierry attributes to him, as his worse self, 'les instincts les plus violents; la cruauté, l'astuce, l'egoïsme impitoyable.' The two first counts are undeniable-at least during his youth: they were the common vices of the age. The two latter I must hold as not proven by facts: but were they proven, they would still be excusable, on the simple ground of his Greek education. 'Cunning and pitiless egotism' were the only moral qualities which Dietrich is likely to have seen exercised at the court of Constantinople: and what wonder, if he was somewhat demoralized by the abominable atmo