Now both Franks and Goths had passed into the Empire long before the invasion of 407. One branch of the Franks, as we have already hinted, was actually settled on Roman lands, and, as Roman subjects, they did their best to withstand the great invasion. What then makes that invasion so marked an epoch? It may be argued that the nations which took a part in it are not those which play any great and abiding part in European history--the Vandals, great for a season, are isolated, and are great only for a season; the great and abiding part is played by the nations which were in the Empire before they came. The answer is that the invasion of 407 not only brought in new elements, but put the existing elements into new relations to one another. Franks and Goths put on a new character and begin a new life. The Burgundians pass into Gaul, not as a road to Spain, but as a land in which to find many homes. They press down to the south-eastern corner of the land, while the Frank no longer keeps himself in his north-eastern corner, while in the south-west the Goth is settled as for a while the liegeman of Cæsar, and in the north-west a continental Britain springs into being. Here in truth are some of the chiefest elements of the modern world, and though none of them are among the nations that crossed the Rhine in 407, yet the new position taken by all of them is the direct consequence of that crossing. In this way, in Gaul and Spain at least, the joint Vandal, Alan, and Suevian invasion is the beginning of the formation of the modern nations, though the invading nations themselves form no element in the later life of Gaul and only a secondary element in the later life of Spain. The later life of these lands, and that of Italy also, has sprung of the settlement of Teutonic nations in a Roman land, and of the mutual influences which Roman and Teuton have had on one another. Roman and Teuton lived side by side, and out of their living side by side has gradually sprung up a third thing different from either, a thing which we cannot call either Roman or Teutonic, or more truly a thing which we may call Roman and Teutonic and some other things as well, according to the side of it which we look at. This third thing is the Romance element in modern Europe, the Romance nations and their Romance tongues. Their birth, perhaps rather the appearance of their first germs, comes in the fifth century; we do not see them in their fulness till ages afterwards; but it is then that the causes out of which they sprang began to work. Unluckily it is hard to find a land in which the elements of the fifth century have been allowed to run their natural course undisturbed to this day. Italy had no chance. Had not the system of Theodoric been violently broken up, first by the Imperial reconquest, then by the Lombard invasion, Italy might have supplied the best of all studies of the way in which a Romance people with a Romance speech might grow up on the very soil of Rome herself.