The part which this incident played in St. Augustine’s own conversion must be told hereafter in his life. But the scene which his master-hand has drawn is not merely the drama of his own soul or of these two young officers, but of a whole empire. It is, as I said at first, the tragedy and suicide of the old empire; and the birth-agony of which he speaks was not that of an individual soul here or there, but of a whole new world, for good and evil. The old Roman soul was dead within, the body of it dead without. Patriotism, duty, purpose of life, save pleasure, money, and intrigue, had perished. The young Roman officer had nothing left for which to fight; the young Roman gentleman nothing left for which to be a citizen and an owner of lands. Even the old Roman longing (which was also a sacred duty) of leaving an heir to perpetuate his name, and serve the state as his fathers had before him—even that was gone. Nothing was left, with the many, but selfishness, which could rise at best into the desire of saving every man his own soul, and so transform worldliness into other-worldliness. The old empire could do nothing more for man; and knew that it could do nothing; and lay down in the hermit’s cell to die. Trêves was then “the second metropolis of the empire,” boasting, perhaps, even then, as it boasts still, that it was standing thirteen hundred years before Rome was built. Amid the low hills, pierced by rocky dells, and on a strath of richest soil, it had grown, from the mud-hut town of the Treviri, into a noble city of palaces, theatres, baths, triumphal-arches, on either side the broad and clear Moselle. The bridge which Augustus had thrown across the river, four hundred years before the times of hermits and of saints, stood like a cliff through all barbarian invasions, through all the battles and sieges of the Middle Age, till it was blown up by the French in the wars of Louis XIV., and nought remains save the huge piers of black lava stemming the blue stream; while up and down the dwindled city, the colossal fragments of Roman work—the Black Gate, the Heidenthurm, the baths, the Basilica or Hall of Justice, now a Lutheran church—stand out half ruined, like the fossil bones of giants amid the works of weaker, though of happier times; while the amphitheatre was till late years planted thick with vines, fattening in soil drenched with the blood of thousands. Trêves had been the haunt of emperor after emperor, men wise and strong, cruel and terrible;—of Constantius, Constantine the Great, Julian, Valentinian, Valens; and lastly, when Potitianus’s friends found those poor monks in the garden {27} of Gratian, the gentle hunter who thought day and night on sport, till his arrows were said to be instinct with life, was holding his military court within the walls of Trêves, or at that hunting palace on the northern downs, where still on the bath-floors lie the mosaics of hare and deer,