never found abiding rest for the sole of his foot; he never became the acknowledged territorial master of a single inch of Roman soil. But before he had gone to rest in his grave beneath the waters, before the Gothic trumpet was heard at the Salarian gate, before he entered by the same path by which Brennus had entered well nigh eight hundred years before, the path from which Hannibal had turned away, the path on which Pontius of Telesia had dealt the last blow for free and disunited Italy, before that day of fear and wonder in the annals alike of the waning and of the rising power, another act in the great drama had begun. Other Teutonic settlers had begun to establish themselves as abiding dwellers on Roman soil, and the Goth was presently to follow in their steps. * * * * * We are now landed in the fifth century of our æra, the century which beheld the earliest germs of the nations of modern Europe. It is the age which, more than any other, answers to the third and second centuries before our æra. They answer to one another, because the later period, to a great degree, reverses the work of the earlier. The former period made the Roman Empire; the latter went far to unmake it. Never, till the days of its gradual dying out, did it come so near, in the Western lands at least, to being broken in pieces. We might say in truth that in the West the Empire was broken in pieces in the fifth century, but that it was largely put together again in the sixth by a reaction from the East. For the first aspect of that age is that which has been already pointed out, the fact that, while the political power of Rome is thus shivered in the West, in the East it maintains itself, to some extent even enlarges itself. The Eastern division of the Empire, the lot of the successors of Arcadius, is that which really kept up the unbroken political traditions of Rome. It has its wars and its revolutions, its settings up and puttings down of Emperors; it even sees the marching to and fro of Teutonic armies. But all seems mild compared with the turmoil of the West. The war with the Persian, ended at last by an honourable peace which abides for a hundred years, is another matter from the endless struggle with the German on every frontier. The occasional revolts at Constantinople do not begin till the second half of the century, and they pass for nothing alongside of the series of tyrants and momentary Emperors which disturbed the West during nearly the whole time. The Eastern throne was so far the firmer that the West was over and over again willing to accept an Emperor of his Eastern colleague’s choosing. Above all, the Eastern provinces were not parted out among Teutonic rulers. The Eastern movements of Alaric hardly reach into the fifth century, and the marchings to and fro of the two Theodorics at a later time were a trifle compared with the great invasions which parted out the West into Teutonic kingdoms.