There is no more fascinating effort open to the historian than to glance back through the mists of the centuries and attempt to penetrate the gloom of this dark age, and visualise its social conditions. At best such an attempt at reconstructing the distant past can be but partially successful. If it be true that “we view the world through our own eyes, each of us, and make from within us the things we see,” as Thackeray tells us regarding our contemporary environment, vastly more distorted must our image be of any past events. Where the monuments, art treasures, and the literature of a great civilisation have been preserved to us, as in the case of Egypt and Mesopotamia, and Greece, and Rome, we have aids and accessories for the reconstruction of the picture that enable us to view our rehabilitation with a certain confidence. But where these mementoes of the past are lost or altogether lacking, the picture must, indeed, be a vague and uncertain one,--the foggy tracery of the impressionist as contrasted with the firm outlines of a Michelangelo. And such are the disadvantages that beset the task of reconstructing the image of Italy, or indeed of any other part of Europe, in the so-called dark age. It was a time when the wealth of the later empire had been transferred to the East. Western Europe was poverty-stricken; and this practical fact, perhaps more than any other one cause, operated to prevent the construction of such monuments of architecture and of art as the earlier centuries achieved. We have seen illustrated again and again that the seat of the greatest civilisation is almost sure to be the commercial and monetary centre of the world; and we shall see the same thing illustrated again with renewed force at a later day in Italy, when the gold of the Florentine tradesmen, the Medici, stimulates the art development of the later Renaissance. But in these post-imperial times Italy has no wealth in commerce, as compared with the new centre of the empire in Constantinople. Such Romans as remain in Italy are too poor to build palaces and amphitheatres comparable to those of their predecessors. They have enough to do to guard themselves against the invaders from the north. At best they can hardly repair the structures that the earlier civilisation has left them. We read that in Venice it was at one time made a legal offence, punishable with a fine of one thousand florins, to suggest any draft on the public treasury for repairing state buildings. According to the familiar tradition, the doge who finally had the temerity to violate the restriction, came before the council with the thousand florins in his hand when making the suggestion. This story illustrates the financial stress under which the Italian cities laboured even at a comparatively late period of the Middle Ages.