The grand old Latin language, containing in its literature the garnered up thoughts and attainments of centuries, spread its refining influences wherever the Roman camp was pitched. Latin was the official language in Roman Britain, and it would be known and probably spoken by the well-to- do Britons in the towns. But it never amalgamated with the old Celtic- Welsh of the common people. Celtic, although in many respects a well- constructed language, is not a pliant one—is not adapted for readily intermingling with other tongues. It has in its various dialects, which have through the succeeding centuries maintained their existence in Wales, in Ireland, and in the Highlands of Scotland, kept itself altogether apart from the English language; and it has given comparatively few of its words to the modern tongue. In the third century the Roman empire was in its decline, and hastening to its fall. Constantine transferred the seat of government to Byzantium, and that city was thenceforth named from him, Constantinople; and then the Roman power was divided—there were eastern emperors and western emperors. In the Patriarch of the Greek Church residing in Constantinople and the Pope of the Catholic Church in Rome, we have that division perpetuated to this day. The Romans had never been able to conquer more than small portions of the great country in Central Europe which lies north of the Danube and east of the Rhine, which we now call Germany. One Teutonic chief called Arminius, afterwards styled _The Deliverer_, destroyed a whole Roman invading army. Towards the end of the fourth century the Teutonic nations began to press into the Roman empire, and one by one the provinces were wrested from it by these incursions. The Romans hired one tribe against another; but stage by stage the empire shrank in its dimensions, until it came to be within the frontiers of Italy; and still the barbarians pressed in. On the 24th day of August, 410, the evening sun was gilding the roof of the venerable Capitol, and peace and serenity seemed to hover over the eternal city. But at midnight the Gothic trumpets sounded as the blasts of doom. No devoted Horatius now kept bridge and gate as in the brave days of old. Alaric, “the curse of God,” stormed the city, to burn and slay and inflict all the horrors of assault; but sparing Christian churches, monks and nuns. It is said that forty thousand slaves in the city rose against their masters.