It is these which are the real work of the fifth century. At its beginning, the Empire, with the boundaries of Valentinian hardly touched, is divided between the sons of Theodosius as Imperial colleagues. At its end, a single Emperor reigns at Constantinople; but the whole West, with Rome itself, has fallen away from his practical dominion, and the greater part has passed from even his nominal supremacy. The power of Rome lives on only in those Eastern lands into which she made her way when her power in the West was assured by the weakening of the power of Carthage. She has lost the fruits of the fights of Metaurus and of Zama, of the leaguer of New Carthage and the leaguer of Syracuse; she keeps the fruits of the day of Kynoskephalai and the day of Pydna, the day of Thermopylai and the day of Magnêsia. The genius of Rome, banished from his elder seat by the Tiber, is watching from his newer seat by the Bosporos till the old home can be won back again. The two ages which we have thus casually brought together, the age in which the East was won for Rome and the age in which the West fell away from Rome, supply, as has been already hinted, some most instructive points of comparison and contrast. The two ages may be compared and contrasted from two points of view, one as regards the breaking up of the Roman power, the other as regards the formation of the Teutonic powers which so largely took its place. We may compare the way in which the Roman power was formed and the way in which it fell in pieces. We may also compare the way in which the Roman power was formed and the way in which the powers were formed which took its place. We will begin with the former comparison, with the analogy, as a political study, between the way in which the power of Rome came together and the way in which it split asunder. As that power emphatically was not made but grew, so, no less emphatically, it was not abolished but died out. That is of course in those lands where, as in Gaul and in the greater part of Spain, it can be said to have ever died out. In any land that came under the power of Rome, that power was established step by step; so in any land that fell away from the power of Rome, that power vanished away step by step. The intermediate state between complete independence and complete subjection, the various stages of alliance and dependence, play a great part alike in the work of welding together and in the work of splitting asunder. Rome has again her allied and vassal kings, in some cases even her allied and vassal commonwealths. They passed from subjection to complete independence by the same path by which they had passed from independence to complete subjection. But in such cases it makes a wide difference in which direction men’s faces are turned. The formal relation may be the same; the real position is different. In the elder case alliance is a decent name for subjection which the time has not yet come to press to the extreme point. In