did not pass, nor were his people comforted. The ancient world never recovered from the blow, Niebuhr says. While it yet raged, another call to arms came, this time from the Danube. It was the severest onset of the barbarians which the Roman Empire had yet endured. All the tribes from the Rhine to the Don, Teutonic and Slavonic, seemed in league against it. These wild Northmen, chaste and strong of limb, had hurled themselves on the Danube frontier and broken into the sacred precincts of the _Pax Romana_. The Danube passed, Pannonia, Dacia, Greece were overrun. The prints of Northern hoofs were on the plains of Rhætia and Noricum; and the wild Marcomanni were seen in the streets of Venice and Padua. Well might the Romans fear that it would be with them now as it was in the days of Hannibal. Aye, and even worse; for the Romans of the second century of the Empire were not the Romans of the second or third century before the fall of the Republic; and to replace a Scipio and a Marcellus, they had for leader not a Vespasian or a Trajan, but a sickly “Greekling,” “a philosophical old woman,” as Avidius Cassius used to call him. This was their Emperor Aurelius, and in these wars on the Danube he was amply to refute these taunts of the men of rougher mould. His was the great task of stemming the first inflow of those nomadic tribes which, two centuries later, swept in full flood-tide over the Empire; and he performed it well if not greatly. The heralds of the revolt found him at his work of peace and legislation, of charity and self-culture in the capital. Now came the test of his principles of devotion to duty. Would he face the loneliness, spiritual and intellectual, the barbarity, the long-drawn desolation of a campaign in the dull plains of Hungary? Would he be a leader to his people? or would he, like certain selfish souls, wrap himself in himself and seek his own advancement towards the sapiency of the perfect Stoic at the cost of his people? It was the test of a man; and he answered well to it. He elected to lead the troops in person.