[22] See preface to _Labors of Persiles and Sigismunda: A Romance_, the last work of Cervantes, and left unfinished at his death. [23] “May you sleep well!” [24] Common sitting-room. [25] “Assuredly, sir.” [26] “Ah! yes.” [27] “And he puts on the ears of an ass quietly moving along.” [28] “A Digression in Praise of an Ass.” [29] “I let down my ears as a young ass of stubborn mind when he has taken a burden too heavy for his back.” [30] “Since even on festive days, right and the laws allow us to do certain things.” [31] “Often the driver loads the sides of the slow ass with oil or cheap fruit, and bringing back the wrought stone,” etc. [32] “No one is so savage that he cannot be tamed if he will lend an ear to instruction.” THE ROMAN EMPIRE AND THE MISSION OF THE BARBARIANS. “Our clock strikes when there is a change from hour to hour; but no hammer in the horologe of time peals through the universe when there is a change from era to era.”[33] So writes Mr. Carlyle in one of his powerful essays; and he is correct. As gradually and as silently as childhood passes into youth, and youth into manhood, and manhood again into old age, so does a nation and the world itself pass from one era into another. But if the signal of such a change is not heard sounding through the world, the moment of the transition is foreknown and has been preordained by God, under whose eye all agents throughout the universe are ever acting out their parts. Men are sometimes taken by surprise, but God never. Men are often mistaken in their calculations of the action of natural forces, but it cannot be so with God. A revolution brews like an angry storm, all in silence; and bursts; and a nation is shivered into fragments. Men are amazed; they have made a false reckoning; but the storm has brewed under the eye of God, and gathered its hidden forces, and burst at the very moment that God allowed it, and the havoc has been done up to the time which he has marked out. This is the expression of a great Catholic principle of history which it is well, especially in this age of godless theories, to keep constantly before our minds. We are about to endeavor to show how powerfully the truth of this great historical principle is brought out in that part of history to which our subject refers, for it is well said by Cesare Cantu in his _Storia Universale_,[34] “If ever history was manifested as a visible order of Providence, it was in these times.”