And yet, though thus alike, a profound difference separates Roman architecture from our own; the Romans were never wholly sordid, nor did they ever niggle. When they built a wall, that wall was solid masonry, not painted iron; and, even down to Constantine, one chord remained which, when struck, would always vibrate. Usurers may have sat in the Senate, but barbarians filled the legions, and, as long as the triumph wound its way through the Forum, men knew how to raise triumphal arches to the victor. Perhaps, in all the ages, no more serious or majestic monument has been conceived to commemorate the soldier than the column of Trajan, a monument which it has been the ambition of our century to copy. In Paris an imitation of this trophy was erected to the greatest captain of France, and the column of the Place Vendôme serves to mark the grave of the modern martial blood. Raised in 1810, almost at the moment when Nathan Rothschild became despot of the London Stock Exchange, the tide from thence ran swiftly, and, since Sedan, the present generation has drained to the lees the cup of realism. No poetry can bloom in the arid modern soil, the drama has died, and the patrons of art are no longer even conscious of shame at profaning the most sacred of ideals. The ecstatic dream, which some twelfth-century monk cut into the stones of the sanctuary hallowed by the presence of his God, is reproduced to bedizen a warehouse; or the plan of an abbey, which Saint Hugh may have consecrated, is adapted to a railway station. Decade by decade, for some four hundred years, these phenomena have grown more sharply marked in Europe, and, as consolidation apparently nears its climax, art seems to presage approaching disintegration. The architecture, the sculpture, and the coinage of London at the close of the nineteenth century, when compared with those of the Paris of Saint Louis, recall the Rome of Caracalla as contrasted with the Athens of Pericles, save that we lack the stream of barbarian blood which made the Middle Age. [Footnotes] [1] _History of Rome_, Mommsen, Dickson’s trans., i. 288, 290. [2] _History of Rome_, Niebuhr, Hare’s trans., i. 576. Niebuhr has been followed in the text, although the “nexum” is one of the vexed points of Roman law. (See _Über das altrömische Schuldrecht_, Savigny.) The precise form of the contract is, however, perhaps, not very important for the matter in hand, as most scholars seem agreed that it resembled a mortgage, the breach of whose condition involved not only the loss of the pledge, but the personal liberty of the debtor. See _Gaius_, iv. 21. [3] _History of Rome_, Niebuhr, Hare’s trans., ii. 599. But compare _Aulus Gellius_, xx. 1. [4] _Ibid._, i. 582. [5] _History of Rome_, Niebuhr, Hare’s trans., i. 583. [6] _History of Rome_, Mommsen, Dickson’s trans., i. 472. [7] Livy, xlv. 18. [8] _History of Rome_, Niebuhr, Hare’s trans., i. 583.