It is true that when every European element had mixed to form one pattern, things local and well done disappeared. The vague overwhelming and perhaps insoluble problems which concern not a city but the whole world, the discovery of human doom and of the nature and destiny of the soul, these occupied such minds as would in an earlier time have bent themselves to simpler and more feasible tasks than the search after finality. It is true that plastic art, and to a less extent letters, failed: for these fringes of life whose perfection depends upon detail demand for their occasional flowering small and happy States full of fixed dogmas and of certain usages. But though it lost the visible powers antiquity had known, the Empire at its end, when it turned to the contemplation of eternity, broadened much more than our moderns—who are enemies of its religious theory—will admit. The business which Rome undertook in her decline was so noble and upon so great a scale that when it had succeeded, then, in spite of other invasions, the continuity of Europe was saved. We absorbed the few barbarians of the fifth century, we had even the vitality to hold out in the terror and darkness of the ninth, and in the twelfth we re-arose. It was the character of the Western Empire during the first four centuries, and notably its character towards their close, which prevented the sleep of the Dark Ages from being a death. These first four centuries cast the mould which still constrains us; they formed our final creed, they fixed the routes of commerce and the sites of cities, and perpetually in the smallest trifles of topography you come across them still: the boundary of Normandy, as we know it to-day, was fixed by Diocletian. If there can be said of Europe what cannot be said of any other part of the world, that its civilisation never grew sterile and never disappeared, then we owe the power of saying such a thing to that long evening of the Mediterranean. * * * * * [Sidenote: The Arabic Influence] If this pre-eminence of Rome in the process of her conversion is the lesson of all travel it is especially the lesson of Africa; and nowhere is that lesson taught more clear than in Guelma. Here also you may perceive how it was that the particular cause which ruined the spirit of the Roman town also saved its stones, and you may feel, like an atmosphere, the lightness, the permeation, as it were, without pressure:—the perpetual fluid influence which overflowed the province upon the arrival of the Arabs. So that the bone of Rome remain, caught in a drift of ideas which, like fine desert sand, could preserve them for ever.