In France and Spain, much of the Roman province survived, but in England, not the least influential of the group of modern nations, it was, as we have every reason to believe, completely erased by the Saxon invaders, who came fresh from the seats of their barbarism, hating cities and city life, and ignorant of the majesty of Rome. If a Roman element afterwards found its way into England with the Norman conquest, it was rather ecclesiastical than imperial, and those who brought it were Scandinavians to the core. Alfred had been at Rome in his boyhood, it is true, and may have brought away some ideas of central dominion; but his laws open with a long quotation, not from the Pandects, but from the New Testament--his character is altogether that of a Christian, not of a Roman ruler, and if he had any political model before him, it was, probably, at least as much the Hebrew monarchy as the military despotism of the Caesars. Many of the Roman cities remained, and with them their municipal governments, and hence it is assumed that municipal government altogether is Roman. But there was a municipal government in the Saxon capital, and evidently there must be wherever large cities exist with any degree of independence. The Roman law was, at all events so far lost in the early part of the Middle Ages when Christendom was in process of formation that the study of it afterwards seemed new. Roman literature influenced that of mediaeval Christendom down to about the end of the twelfth century. Our writers of the time of Henry II. compose in half classical Latin and affect classical elegancies of style. But then comes a philosophy which in spite of its worship of Aristotle is essentially an original creation of the mediaeval and Catholic mind couched in a language Latin indeed but almost as remote from classical Latin as German itself: the tongue in truth of a new intellectual world. Open Aquinas and ask yourself how much is left of the language or the mind of Rome. The eye of the antiquary sees the Basilica in the Cathedral, but what essential resemblance does the Roman place of judicature and business bear to that marvellous and fantastic poetry of religion writing its hymns in stone? In the same manner the Roman _castra_ are traceable in the form as well as the designation of the mediaeval _castella_. But what resemblance did the feudal militia bear to the legionaries? And what became of the Roman art of war till it was revived by Gustavus Adolphus? The outward mould of Christendom the Roman empire was and that it was so gives it great dignity and interest, but it was no more. The life came from the German forest the life of life from the peasantry of Galilee the least Romanized perhaps of the populations beneath the sway of Rome.