Rome was the second link between the ancient and modern world. In her career of conquest, she garnered all wealth by force; and when she fell, it was at the exact moment when her hoarded treasures would best promote the fortunes of mankind. The eagles of Rome soared with talons and pinions wet with gore, but the seeds of great institutions were thus made the more firmly to adhere, and they bore them over Apennines and the Alps. They were most signally the instruments of Providence for benefitting succeeding nations in literature and religion. By the consequences which ensued upon Roman conquests, the way was cleared for the most auspicious propagation of Christianity; and the suddenness of her fall, as clearly as the savageness of her ascendancy, proved that the wisest scheme of selfishness carries within itself the guaranty of utter dissolution. Into the richness of her ruins were cast the seeds of intellectual renovation, and posterity was made to reap rich harvests from fields plowed by chariots of war and fructified with human blood. That mighty nation was predestined to be a transporter, and not a producer, of ennobling worth; and it was wisely ordered that she should possess no native production of sufficient splendor to make her regardless of those that might come in her way, and whose superior worth she might appropriate. Cicero and Pliny, with their literary associates, were not propounders of new theories, but transmitters and commentators of the old. Thus every age has been conserved, without accumulating a burden too great; and the mighty aggregate, fused into an appropriate adaptation to future uses, has come down to us. If a thousand tributaries, from every direction, were made to pour their currents into one great central reservoir, it was with the divine intention, when the fitting epoch arrived, to empty all the mighty tide towards the western main, and by that means, at a later era, to infuse into a prolific soil all the wisdom of the ancient world. Greece carried individual culture to the highest pitch, but never established social relations on a sufficiently solid basis. It was not her mission to combine subjugated nations into a consolidated union, as the terrible Peloponnesian war and the lamentable history of Alexander and his successors but too sadly proved. To work out the principle of association on a broad and enduring scale was a task destined for the Roman race, and sublimely was it performed. Through the protracted process of conflict between contrasted nations, and their homogeneous assimilation, the great centre of progressive culture was removed another step from the East. More skillful in the art of establishing durable political ties, Rome was soon surrounded by a social net-work which embraced all the historic races. It was a vast empire which recombined preceding epochs, and presented the spectacle of the most brilliant interlacing of universal associations the world has ever seen.