In short, if you look abroad upon the world you will see that the department of life that was formerly attended upon by classical culture has to-day little but the modern work of the imagination to solace it. And that the solace of Literature and the Arts is necessary for--is a craving of--humanity few but the most hardened captains of industry or the most arrogant of professors of Applied Science will be found to deny. Our joint Anglo-Saxon civilization to-day is a fairly savage and materialistic affair, but it is also an affair relatively new and untried. It is perhaps more materialistic than was the civilization of Ancient Rome and a little less savage than the early Dark Ages. But both these former periods of human activity had in the end to develop arts and that, it is probable, will be the case with us. The Romans, it is true, relied for their arts mostly on Greek slaves or on such imitators of the Greeks as Horace and Virgil, and the Dark Ages almost solely on Churchmen who led precarious existences in hidden valleys. But the respective futures of these Ages are worth considering for our present purposes. For the break-up of the Roman Empire for which innumerable reasons have been found by innumerable pundits remains at least as mysterious as it was before the first ancestor of Mommsen first dug up his first tile and upon it wrote his first monograph. Mommsen, to be sure, used to tell us that Rome disappeared because it had no Hohenzollern family to guide its destinies--and that may be true enough. Gibbon ascribed to Christianity the Fall of the Roman Empire and People; others of the learned have laid that catastrophe at the door of difficulties of communication, of the lack of a modern banking system, of the want of organization of the system of Imperial Finances, or of a mysterious and unexplained slackness that overcame alike the Western and Eastern Empires--a slackness due to the pleasures of the table, the wine-cup, of sex and the like.