The Romans could not stand before this new and strange kind of warfare. The Gauls streamed over the vanquished legions into the Eternal City, silent and deserted save only by the Senate and a few who remained intrenched in the Citadel; and there the barbarians kept them besieged for seven months, while they made themselves at home amid uncomprehended luxuries. Of course Roman skill and courage at last dislodged and drove them back. But the fact remained that the Gaul had been there,--master of Rome; that the ironclad legions had been no match for his naked force, and a new sensation thrilled through the length and breadth of Gaul. It was the first throb of national life. The sixty or more fragments drew closer together into something like Gallic unity--with a common danger to meet, a common foe to drive back. Hereafter there was another hunger to be appeased besides that for food and land; a hunger for conquest, for vengeance, and for glory for the Gallic name. National pride was born. For years they hovered like wolves about Rome. But skill and superior intelligence tell in the centuries. It took long--and cost no end of blood and treasure; but two hundred years from the capture of Rome, the Gauls were driven out of Italy, and the Alps pronounced a barrier set by Nature herself against barbarian encroachments. Italy was not the only country suffering from the destroying footsteps of the Western Kelts. There had been long ago an overflow of a tribe in Northern Gaul (the Kymrians), which had hewed and plundered its way south and eastward; until at the time of Alexander (340 B.C.) it was knocking at the gates of Macedonia. Stimulated by the success at Rome fifty years earlier, they were, with fresh insolence, demanding "land," and during the centuries which followed, the Gallic name acquired no fresh lustre in Greece. Half-naked, gross, ferocious and ignorant, sometimes allies, but always a scourge, they finally crossed the Hellespont (278 B.C.), and turned their attention to Asia Minor. And there, at last, we find them settled in a province called Gallicia, where they lived without amalgamating with the people about them; it is said, even as late as 400 years after Christ, speaking the language of their tribal home (what is now Belgium). And these were the Galatians--the "foolish Galatians," to whom Paul addressed his epistle; and we have followed up this Gallic thread simply because it mingles with the larger strand of ancient and sacred history with which we are all so familiar.