Empire and form part of a barbarian kingdom; it might sometimes be in the intermediate state of a dependency over which the Emperor held an outward superiority which he could enforce or not according to circumstances. All this has its like in the West; but there is nothing in the West like the firm abiding of the Imperial power at Constantinople. Whatever was the extent or the nature of the dominion of the Eastern Emperor, the Eastern Rome was its local centre, the spot to which every corner of that dominion looked as its head. No Slavonic host harried the Eastern Rome as so many Teutonic hosts harried the Western. No king of a Slavonic people received an Imperial crown in Saint Sophia, as so many kings of a Teutonic people received an Imperial crown in Saint Peter’s. The utmost that such a king could do was to set up a Tzarigrad of his own, to wear a crown which he loved to call Imperial at Ochrida or at Skoupi. The Slave became in many things a disciple of the Eastern Rome, but in some things he was perhaps an imitator rather than a disciple. He always remained an outsider, in a way in which the Teuton did not remain in the West. In religious worship, above all, he never adopted either of the tongues of the Empire; he could become a disciple without becoming a subject. No new speech, no new nationality, arose in the East out of a mixture of Slavonic and Roman or Greek elements, answering to the formation of the Romance tongues and nations of the West. One cause, as we shall hereafter see, was that the Eastern Rome spoke with two tongues, while the Western Rome spoke with one only. There is a Romance nation in the East, but the Slave was not one of its component elements; the Slavonic invasion in short did not a little to hinder its growth. On many of these points I may have to speak again. The main business of the present lecture lies in the West, in the Western lands of the European mainland. Yet we must not forget that the birth of our own nation, the settlement of our forefathers in our second home, came within the bounds of the same century which saw Burgundian, Gothic, and Frankish kingdoms arise in Gaul. But we, in our island home, our _alter orbis_, stood largely aloof from the revolutions of the mainland. Our own tale must be told separately, and it cannot be told in all its fulness till the revolutions of the mainland are fully understood. To-day we have had to deal with the settlements of our kinsfolk in the continental provinces of the West. At the East we have simply glanced. We shall have to speak of it more fully when we come to speak of the causes which split East and West apart for ever. LECTURE IV. THE DIVIDED EMPIRE.