So grew up the new nations in the Western lands of Rome, the fruit in some sort, we may say, of the union of Gothia and Romania. But there were other nations which did not spring of that union, nations which kept their untouched Teutonic being, nations which still dwelled beyond the Empire, which within some small parts of the Empire settled in another sort from the Goth and the Burgundian nations. So it was in the island which we won, not from the Roman but from the Briton; so it was in the lands by Rhine and Danube, where our kinsfolk conquered almost in the same sort as we did. Yet even on lands and nations like these the influence of Rome was deep and abiding. Step by step they embraced the faith of Rome; and, without casting away their own tongues, they adopted the tongue of Rome as the tongue of learning and religion. So it was in Germany and Scandinavia; so it was in all the lands whose religion and culture came from Germany;--with the Slaves of the North-West who came within the world of the Western Cæsar and the Western Pontiff, even with the intruding Magyar whose coming split asunder the great Slavonic mass, and left the Pole and the Wend to look to the elder Rome, while the Serb and the Russian looked to the younger. But the great conquest--only which side was the conqueror?--was nearer home. It was another partnership between Gothia and Romania, though of quite another kind from that which was meant to come of the bride-ale of Narbonne, when Rome and Germany fused together their political being, and the Western Empire of Rome became the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. * * * * *