The most renowned of my predecessors in this chair, in planning that History of Rome which unhappily remained a fragment, but which gave to the world in its last finished volume the very perfection of historical narrative, designed to carry on his work to the coronation of Charles the Great. The reading and thought of forty years have ever more and more convinced me of the wisdom of Arnold’s choice. The year 800 was not, any more than the year 476, the end of the Roman Empire; it is not, any more than the year 476, a boundary between “Ancient” and “Modern” History. But it is one of the most marked turning-points in the history of the Empire and of the world, a turning-point of immeasureably greater moment than the consulship of Basiliscus and Armatus. The election of the first Charles changed the face of the world far more than the deposition of the last Romulus. Of a History of Rome such as Arnold planned, it was, as the wise instinct of Arnold saw, the fitting ending. The election of Charles did, in outward show, restore the Old Rome to her old position. She again became, if not the dwelling-place, at least the crowning-place, of Emperors. In truth the Old Rome had never before beheld the ancient Hebrew rite which, from the fifth century onwards, had become familiar in the New. For a thousand years longer the titles of her Empire went on; for seven hundred years longer they could be won only before the altar of the Vatican basilica. For full five hundred years longer the Roman Empire of the West was, as such, a living thing, a thing that influenced the minds and acts of men, a mighty fact, a still mightier theory. But in the West the Emperor of the Romans had less and less to do with the Old Rome. To his Imperial capital he gradually became a stranger, and his capital became a city of strangers to him. In short, the Roman power in the West altogether passed away, not only from the Roman city, but from the artificial Roman nation. When Rome again asserted her right to choose her sovereign, she chose, she could not fail to choose, a man who was not Roman even by adoption. She chose the Frankish king. Pippin had been Patrician; so had Ricimer; so had Odowakar. But the son of Pippin bore a loftier style. The long-abiding tradition was broken through; a barbarian received the diadem; the Roman Pontiff spoke the words, and the Roman people echoed them--“Karolo Augusto, a Deo coronato, magno et pacifico Romanorum Imperatori, vita et victoria.” The German was at last Augustus. No greater witness could there be to the moral conquest which each race had won over the other. The Empire now in form received its greatest territorial enlargement. Gaul was won back and Germany was added. Wherever the Frankish king had before ruled as king, he now ruled as Emperor. Terminus advanced to the Elbe and the Eider; he was ready to advance to the Oder and the Vistula, or, if need should be, to the world’s end. All unreal,