her old heritage as the head of Eastern Christendom than to see the lands of the West again accept the headship of the elder Rome by the Tiber. The line of her Cæsars is broken, broken, we may be sure, for ever. Her Pontiffs have not wisdom enough to see how their œcumenical position has been raised by deliverance from the shackles of local sovereignty. But to him who begins at the middle or at the end, to him who leaves off at the middle--to him who, under the influence of either error, has not given his mind to grasp the whole tale from the kingship on the Palatine to the kingship on the Quirinal--the things which make our own age so wonderful are things which lack a meaning. He who vainly dreams that he will better understand his own times by beginning his historic work with the times immediately before them--he who listens to false charmers who bid him seek, perhaps historic honours but assuredly not historic knowledge, by preferring the flashy glitter of some sixth or seventh period to the solid work of his Gregory or his Einhard--he will find out--no, he will never learn enough to find out--that there is no royal road to the knowledge even of his own times. His penalty will be to walk in an age as strange and memorable as any that went before it, and not to know in how strange and memorable an age it is in which he is walking. We live then in a Romeless age, and to those who have eyes to see it is one of the chief wonders of our age that it is Romeless. But our age is Romeless because we live in a world from which Rome has passed away; those far-gone ages were Romeless because Rome had not yet made her way to the place which the world’s destiny had marked for her. The position of those ages in the general tale of European history was the subject of the first lecture of this course six weeks back. In that lecture and in the one which followed it I strove to point out how Rome, having by slow steps risen to the first place in the West, burst suddenly into the midst of another political system, a system of kingdoms and commonwealths which was in many points a forestalling of the political system of the world in which we now live. And we may go yet further back, to days when Rome was so far from being the head of the world that her name could hardly have been known in the world. By one of the strange cycles of history, we who dwell in the wide world of modern times, the world of continents and oceans--nothing better shows its vastness than that we are driven to form a plural for this last primæval name--have in some points come back to the state of those who dwelled in the narrow world of the earliest times, the little world of islands, peninsulas, and inland seas. We have come back to the state of things that was, not only before Rome stood forth to rule the nations, but before Macedonian kingdoms and Greek confederations had cut short the right of every single town on its hill or in its island to act