Throughout this immense machine, he established underworks in harmony with the principle of his government; he regulated the action of the central power in the provinces, and surrounded himself with a brilliant and puissant court: but he did not rekindle the moral life of the Empire; he merely organized more perfectly a material resistance to the principles of destruction which were undermining it; and it was with this organization that, first in the West as well as in the East, and afterwards in the East alone, the Empire was able to struggle on, from the fourth to the fifteenth century. Theodosius the Great, who died in 395, was the last emperor who tightly held and skilfully managed the heterogeneous bundle of the Roman power. He was truly a great man; for great men appear in disgraceful times, as well as in times of success; and Theodosius was still the master of the Roman world. As soon as he was dead, the dissolution broke out, under his sons Honorius and Arcadius.[Footnote 2] [Footnote 2: Honorius succeeded peaceably to the sovereignty of the West, which he had received from his father in the preceding year; while his elder brother Arcadius obtained possession of the East.] {25} Abandonment Of Its Colonies. There was now no real unity or central force in the government; Rome gradually abandoned her provinces--Great Britain, Armorica, [Footnote 3] and Narbonnese Gaul. [Footnote 4] [Footnote 3: The country on the north-west coast of Gaul, from the Loire to the Seine.] [Footnote 4: The Roman province in the south of Gaul, so called from its chief city, Narbo or Narbonne; Cæsar calls it simply _Provincia_, and hence comes the modern name of Provence.]