Even in our little group among the Sabine hills, how many races, periods, types were thrown together! In Fabricius, not a lifeless fossil, but a living survival of the grand old Rome of law and order and self-sacrificing patriotism, the traces of which had made it possible for the corrupt new Rome to linger on so long. In Damaris, not the painted artificial Hellenism of her present surroundings, but a genuine afterglow of the noble, simple beauty of early Greece, beauty as natural and inevitable as the beauty of the lines and curves of flowers and waves. In Miriam, the fervent, adoring, exulting, thirsting love for the God of the fathers of the old Hebrew Psalmists; the boundless, helpful pity for men of the old Hebrew prophets. In Eleazar, the old exclusive, passionate patriotism of his people, which in the isolation of exile had so long only seemed to survive in that passion for possession which the old prophets had so continually detected and so unsparingly denounced; and now that this icy spell was broken, the old passion of patriotism had revived in the passionate love of the family, always recognized by the Law and the Prophets as the sacred core of national life, the sacred shrine of what was most heart-stirring in the national Ritual. In the Greek hermit of the cave, a survival of the early Greek Church of the Roman catacombs; and also an outpost of the great army of monks and solitaries, which was to conquer the wildernesses, material and moral, of Western Christendom. In Marius, sunset melting into dawn through his Ethne; his weariness of the faded classicism of an imitative culture, and the unreality of subtle debates about a faith which had no bearing on practice, vanishing in the freshness of her new heavenly life; all that was true and beautiful in the fading old world living anew for him in the morning dew of her new day. Soon after the Vandals had sailed off for Africa, Fabricius and Marius went again to Rome to look after the desolated palace on the Aventine. The walls were still there, but little else. The Vandals, said to be the greatest experts at plunder among the barbarians, had done their work effectually. Traces of barbaric feasts were strewn about the deserted rooms; fragments of familiar household treasures, cherished from childhood, were scattered over the broken mosaic pavements as mere refuse of useless and abandoned plunder; the frescoed walls were stained and scarred. In the gardens the thickets of roses were trampled and crushed, the trellised vines torn down and broken. There was a sense of outrage and desecration over all, which for the time made the dear familiar things and places terrible and weird and ghastly. They had to say to themselves again and again—“These trampled flowers, and prostrate vines, and despoiled halls and chambers do not _feel_ their dishonour. And ere long for us also the vulgar associations scrawled over them will be obliterated, and the earlier characters will reappear.”