In the present case there can be no doubt that this rule held true. The nations of the north were gifted with potentialities that were rapidly developed through imitation of the southern civilisation. Long before the so-called dark ages ended, there began to be centres of civilisation in the north, and here and there a man of real genius--a Roger Bacon or an Abelard--appeared to prove the rapid forward sweep of the culture movement, since the highest genius never towers far above the culture level of its time. But this could not have come to pass if the invader from the north had entered Italy as an all-devastating eliminator of previous civilisations. He came to conquer, but he remained to learn the arts of civilisation. In a word, then, we shall gain a truer picture of the state of Italy in the so-called dark age if we think of it as differing not so greatly in the ideals of its material civilisation from the Italy of the Roman Empire. There is no great architecture, no great art, no great literature; but we cannot believe that there were absolutely no aspirations towards these antique ideals. When we recall how much that was known to be produced in the earlier day has been utterly lost, we need not doubt that there were some productions even in the field of literature, of which we now have no knowledge, that we would gladly reclaim from oblivion. The _cacoethes scribendi_ is too dominant an impulse to be quite absent from any generation; surely, human nature did not change so utterly in the dark age as to rout this impulse from the human mind. What chiefly did occur, apparently, was the direction of the literary impulse into an unfortunate channel--the channel of ecclesiasticism. This carried it to a maelstrom from which the would-be producer of literature was not able to disengage himself for many generations. A startling evidence of this is found in the fact that as Robinson[1] points out, there was no literary layman of renown from Boetius (d. 524 or 525 A.D.) to Dante (1265-1321 A.D.). Let us think, then, of the dark age as a time when Italy was impoverished; a time when its material civilisation retrogressed; a time when the stress of new conditions thrust some of the old ideals into the background; but also as a time when the mixture of races was taking place that was to give new strength and fibre to a senescent people; and to make possible the resuscitation of the old ideals, the rehabilitation of the old material civilisation, the regeneration of the race. THE ELEVENTH AND TWELFTH CENTURIES The regeneration is not to be effected, however, for some time to come. The 11th and the 12th centuries are at best to see only the dawning of the new day.