through treason or from the negligence of the garrisons stationed in the passes of the Pyrenees, were overwhelmed by a deluge of savage marauders. For four hundred years, the beautiful, the rich, the fertile and densely populated Peninsula had enjoyed the inestimable blessings of peace. With the defeat and death of the sons of Pompey, the last vestige of civil war and intestine discord had disappeared from its borders. Its fields were cultivated with assiduous care; its seaports were thronged with the shipping of the Mediterranean; the manufacturing interests of its inland cities were diversified and important. Its people, who had inherited from Rome and Carthage that love of pleasure which was at once their boast and their disgrace, with Epicurean unconcern, lived only for the present, in the participation of all the luxury which boundless wealth and national prosperity could bestow. Upon this earthly paradise--with its splendid cities, its sumptuous villas, its majestic souvenirs of Roman greatness, its traditions of heroic achievement and maritime adventure; where Hannibal had gained his boyhood’s laurels, and Cæsar, moved by the sight of Alexander’s statue, had first aspired to the dominion of the world--now descended the brutal and licentious plunderers of the North. The excesses perpetrated by them in other provinces of the empire were trivial when compared with the havoc they committed in Iberia. No considerations of public policy, no sentiments of mercy, interposed to mitigate the calamities which befell the smiling plains of the Anas, the Iberus, and the Bætis. Such of the inhabitants as were fortunate enough to find an asylum behind the walls of fortified cities, soon paid for their temporary security with the pangs of famine. The growing crops, delivered to the torch, left to-day a blackened waste where only yesterday had been every promise of an abundant harvest. A smoky pall, appropriate symbol of destruction, overhung the sites of prosperous hamlets and marble villas, where a few smouldering embers alone indicated the former abode of taste and opulence. Heaps of corpses, denied the rites of sepulture, covered the land, which was infested with incredible numbers of wolves and birds of prey, attracted from every side to their loathsome and inexhaustible repast. A feeling of utter despair fell upon the survivors; the instincts of humanity and the feelings of nature were suspended or destroyed; men murdered their families and then committed suicide; women devoured their offspring; exposure, want, suffering, and anxiety produced their inevitable consequences; and the crowning misfortune, the pestilence, daily claimed its victims by thousands. The savage masters of the country, satiated with rapine and mutually jealous of power, now began to quarrel with each other. In the contests which ensued, almost from the first, the superior organization and martial genius of the Goths