As I said, they had no plan left now. Two years they stayed in Campania, basking in the villas and gardens, drinking their fill of the wine; and then flowed away northward again, no one knows why. They had no wish to settle, as they might have done. They followed some God-given instinct, undiscoverable now by us. Ataulf, Alaric's kinsman, married Placidia, the Emperor's beautiful young sister, and accepted from him some sort of commission to fight against his enemies in Gaul. So to the south of Gaul they went, and then into Spain, crushing before them Alans, Sueves, and Vandals, and quarrelling among themselves. Ataulf was murdered, and all his children; Placidia put to shame. Then she had her revenge. To me it is not so much horrible as pitiful. They had got the Nibelungen hoard; and with it the Nibelungen curse. A hundred years afterwards, when the Franks pillaged the Gothic palace of Narbonne, they found the remnants of it. Things inestimable, indescribable; tables of solid emerald; the Missorium, a dish 2500 lbs. weight, covered with all the gems of India. They had been in Solomon's Temple, fancied the simple Franks--as indeed some of them may well have been. The Arabs got the great emerald table at last, with its three rows of great pearls. Where are they all now? What is become, gentlemen, of the treasures of Rome? Jewels, recollect, are all but indestructible; recollect, too, that vast quantities were buried from time to time, and their places forgotten. Perhaps future generations will discover many such hoards. Meanwhile, many of those same jewels must be in actual use even now. Many a gem which hangs now on an English lady's wrist saw Alaric sack Rome--and saw before and since--What not? The palaces of the Pharaohs, or of Darius; then the pomp of the Ptolemies, or of the Seleucids--came into Europe on the neck of some vulgar drunken wife of a Roman proconsul, to glitter for a few centuries at every gladiator's butchery in the amphitheatre; then went away with Placidia on a Gothic ox- waggon, to pass into an Arab seraglio at Seville; and then, perhaps, back from Sultan to Sultan again to its native India, to figure in the peacock- throne of the Great Mogul, and be bought at last by some Armenian for a few rupees from an English soldier, and come hither--and whither next? When England shall be what Alexandria and Rome are now, that little stone will be as bright as ever.--An awful symbol, if you will take it so, of the permanence of God's works and God's laws, amid the wild chance and change of sinful man. Then followed for Rome years of peace,--such peace as the wicked make for themselves--A troubled sea, casting up mire and dirt. Wicked women, wicked counts (mayors of the palace, one may call them) like Aetius and Boniface, the real rulers of a nominal Empire.