You recollect the Lombards, of whom Tacitus says, 'Longobardos paucitas nobilitat.' Paulus Warnefrid was one of their descendants, and his history carries out the exact truth of Tacitus' words. He too speaks of them as a very small tribe. He could not foresee how much the 'nobilitat' meant. He knew his folk as a brave semi-feudal race, who had conquered the greater part of Italy, and tilled and ruled it well; who were now conquered by Charlemagne, and annexed to the great Frank Empire, but without losing anything of their distinctive national character. He did not foresee that they would become the architects, the merchants, the goldsmiths, the bankers, the scientific agriculturists of all Europe. We know it. Whenever in London or any other great city, you see a 'Lombard Street,' an old street of goldsmiths and bankers--or the three golden balls of Lombardy over a pawnbroker's shop--or in the country a field of rye-grass, or a patch of lucerne--recollect this wise and noble people, and thank the Lombards for what they have done for mankind. Paulus is a garrulous historian, but a valuable one, just because he is garrulous. Though he turned monk and deacon in middle life, he has not sunk the man in the monk, and become a cosmopolite, like most Roman ecclesiastics, who have no love or hate for human beings save as they are friends or enemies of the pope, or their own abbey. He has retained enough of the Lombard gentleman to be proud of his family, his country, and the old legends of his race, which he tells, half-ashamed, but with evident enjoyment. He was born at beautiful Friuli, with the jagged snow-line of the Alps behind him, and before him the sun and the sea, and the plains of Po; he was a courtier as a boy in Desiderius' court at Pavia, and then, when Charlemagne destroyed the Lombard monarchy, seems to have been much with the great king at Aix. He certainly ended his life as a Benedictine monk, at Monte Casino, about 799; having written a Life of St. Gregory; Homilies long and many; the Appendix to Eutropius (the Historia Miscella, as it is usually called) up to Justinian's time; and above all, this history of the Lombards, his forefathers, which I shall take as my text. To me, and I believe to the great German antiquaries, his history seems a model history of a nation. You watch the people and their story rise before you out of fable into fact; out of the dreary darkness of the unknown north, into the clear light of civilized Roman history.