There is no force left in Italy now, which can oppose him. Hardly any left in the Roman world. The plague is come; to add its horrors to all the other horrors of the time--the true old plague, as far as I can ascertain; bred, men say, from the Serbonian bog; the plague which visited Athens in the time of Socrates, and England in the seventeenth century: and after the plague a famine; woe on woe, through all the dark days of Justinian the demon-emperor. The Ostrogoths, as you know, were extinct as a nation. The two deluges of Franks and Allmen, which, under the two brothers Buccelin and Lothaire, all on foot (for the French, as now, were no horsemen), had rolled into Italy during the Gothic war, had been swallowed up, as all things were, in the fatal gulf of Italy. Lothaire and his army, returning laden with plunder, had rotted away like sheep by Lake Benacus (Garda now) of drink, and of the plague. Buccelin, entrenched among his plunder-waggons by the Volturno stream in the far south, had waited in vain for that dead brother and his dead host, till Narses came on him, with his army of trained Herules and Goths; the Francisc axe and barbed pike had proved useless before the arrows and the cavalry of the Romans; and no more than five Allmen, says one, remained of all that mighty host. Awful to think of: 75,000 men, they say, in one column, 100,000 in the other: and like water they flowed over the land; and like water they sank into the ground, and left no trace. And now Narses, established as exarch of Ravenna, a sort of satrap, like those of the Persian Emperors, and representing the Emperor of Constantinople, was rewarded for all his conquests and labours by disgrace. Eunuch-like, he loved money, they said; and eunuch-like, he was harsh and cruel. The Empress Sophia, listening too readily to court- slanders, bade him 'leave to men the use of arms, and come back to the palace, to spin among the maids.'--'Tell her,' said the terrible old imp, 'I will spin her such a thread as she shall not unravel.' He went, superseded by Longinus; but not to Constantinople. From Naples he sent (so says Paul the Deacon) to Alboin, and bade him come and try his fortune as king of Italy. He sent, too, (so says old Paul) presents to tempt the simple Lombard men--such presents as children would like--all fruits which grew in Italian orchards. Though the gold was gone, those were still left. Great babies they were, these Teutons, as I told you at the first; and Narses knew it well, and had used them for his ends for many a year. Then were terrible signs seen in Italy by night; fiery armies fighting in the sky, and streams of blood aloft, foreshadowing the blood which should be shed.