28. So that, accurately thought of, the quality of Frankness glances only with the flat side of it into any meaning of 'Libre,' but with all its cutting edge, determinedly, and to all time, it signifies Brave, strong, and honest, above other men.[15] The old woodland race were never in any wolfish sense 'free,' but in a most human sense Frank, outspoken, meaning what they had said, and standing to it, when they had got it out. Quick and clear in word and act, fearless utterly and restless always;—but idly lawless, or weakly lavish, neither in deed nor word. Their frankness, if you read it as a scholar and a Christian, and not like a modern half-bred, half-brained infidel, knowing no tongue of all the world but in the slang of it, is really opposed, not to Servitude,—but to Shyness![16] It is to this day the note of the sweetest and Frenchiest of French character, that it makes simply perfect Servants. Unwearied in protective friendship, in meekly dextrous omnificence, in latent tutorship; the lovingly availablest of valets,—the mentally and personally bonniest of bonnes. But in no capacity shy of you! Though you be the Duke or Duchess of Montaltissimo, you will not find them abashed at your altitude. They will speak 'up' to you, when they have a mind.

[Footnote 15: Gibbon touches the facts more closely in a sentence of his 22nd chapter. "The independent warriors of Germany, who considered truth as the noblest of their virtues, and freedom as the most valuable of their possessions." He is speaking especially of the Frankish tribe of the Attuarii, against whom the Emperor Julian had to re-fortify the Rhine from Cleves to Basle: but the first letters of the Emperor Jovian, after Julian's death, "delegated the military command of Gaul and Illyrium (what a vast one it was, we shall see hereafter), to Malarich, a brave and faithful officer of the nation of the Franks;" and they remain the loyal allies of Rome in her last struggle with Alaric. Apparently for the sake only of an interesting variety of language,—and at all events without intimation of any causes of so great a change in the national character,—we find Mr. Gibbon in his next volume suddenly adopting the abusive epithets of Procopius, and calling the Franks "a light and perfidious nation" (vii. 251). The only traceable grounds for this unexpected description of them are that they refuse to be bribed either into friendship or activity, by Rome or Ravenna; and that in his invasion of Italy, the grandson of Clovis did not previously send exact warning of his proposed route, nor even entirely signify his intentions till he had secured the bridge of the Po at Pavia; afterwards declaring his mind with sufficient distinctness by "assaulting, almost at the same instant, the hostile camps of the Goths and Romans, who, instead of uniting their arms, fled with equal precipitation."]

[Footnote 16: For detailed illustration of the word, see 'Val d'Arno,' Lecture VIII.; 'Fors Clavigera,' Letters XLVI. 231, LXXVII. 137; and Chaucer, 'Romaunt of Rose,' 1212—"Next him" (the knight sibbe to Arthur) "daunced dame Franchise;"—the English lines are quoted and commented on in the first lecture of 'Ariadne Florentina'; I give the French here:—

"Apres tous ceulx estoit Franchise Que ne fut ne brune ne bise. Ains fut comme la neige blanche Courtoyse estoit, joyeuse, et franche. Le nez avoit long et tretis, Yeulx vers, riants; sourcilz faitis; Les cheveulx eut tres-blons et longs Simple fut comme les coulons Le coeur eut doulx et debonnaire. Elle n'osait dire ne faire Nulle riens que faire ne deust."

And I hope my girl readers will never more confuse Franchise with 'Liberty.']

29. Best of servants: best of subjects, also, when they have an equally frank King, or Count, or Captal, to lead them; of which we shall see proof enough in due time;—but, instantly, note this farther, that, whatever side-gleam of the thing they afterwards called Liberty may be meant by the Frank name, you must at once now, and always in future, guard yourself from confusing their Liberties with their Activities. What the temper of the army may be towards its chief, is one question—whether either chief or army can be kept six months quiet,—another, and a totally different one. That they must either be fighting somebody or going somewhere, else, their life isn't worth living to them; the activity and mercurial flashing and flickering hither and thither, which in the soul of it is set neither on war nor rapine, but only on change of place, mood—tense, and tension;—which never needs to see its spurs in the dish, but has them always bright, and on, and would ever choose rather to ride fasting than sit feasting,—this childlike dread of being put in a corner, and continual want of something to do, is to be watched by us with wondering sympathy in all its sometimes splendid, but too often unlucky or disastrous consequences to the nation itself as well as to its neighbours.

30. And this activity, which we stolid beef-eaters, before we had been taught by modern science that we were no better than baboons ourselves, were wont discourteously to liken to that of the livelier tribes of Monkey, did in fact so much impress the Hollanders, when first the irriguous Franks gave motion and current to their marshes, that the earliest heraldry in which we find the Frank power blazoned seems to be founded on a Dutch endeavour to give some distantly satirical presentment of it. "For," says a most ingenious historian, Mons. Andre Favine,—'Parisian, and Advocate in the High Court of the French Parliament in the year 1620'—"those people who bordered on the river Sala, called 'Salts,' by the Allemaignes, were on their descent into Dutch lands called by the Romans 'Franci Salici'" (whence 'Salique' law to come, you observe) "and by abridgment 'Salii,' as if of the verb 'salire,' that is to say 'saulter,' to leap"—(and in future therefore—duly also to dance—in an incomparable manner) "to be quicke and nimble of foot, to leap and mount well, a quality most notably requisite for such as dwell in watrie and marshy places; So that while such of the French as dwelt on the great course of the river" (Rhine) "were called 'Nageurs,' Swimmers, they of the marshes were called 'Saulteurs,' Leapers, so that it was a nickname given to the French in regard both of their natural disposition and of their dwelling; as, yet to this day, their enemies call them French Toades, (or Frogs, more properly) from whence grew the fable that their ancient Kings carried such creatures in their Armes."

31. Without entering at present into debate whether fable or not, you will easily remember the epithet 'Salian' of these fosse-leaping and river-swimming folk (so that, as aforesaid, all the length of Rhine must be refortified against them)—epithet however, it appears, in its origin delicately Saline, so that we may with good discretion, as we call our seasoned Mariners, 'old Salts,' think of these more brightly sparkling Franks as 'Young Salts,'—but this equivocated presently by the Romans, with natural respect to their martial fire and 'elan,' into 'Salii'—exsultantes,[17]—such as their own armed priests of war: and by us now with some little farther, but slight equivocation, into useful meaning, to be thought of as here first Salient, as a beaked promontory, towards the France we know of; and evermore, in brilliant elasticities of temper, a salient or out-sallying nation; lending to us English presently—for this much of heraldry we may at once glance on to—their 'Leopard,' not as a spotted or blotted creature, but as an inevitably springing and pouncing one, for our own kingly and princely shields.

[Footnote 17: Their first mischievous exsultation into Alsace being invited by the Romans themselves, (or at least by Constantius in his jealousy of Julian,)—with "presents and promises,—the hopes of spoil, and a perpetual grant of all the territories they were able to subdue." Gibbon, chap. xix. (3, 208.) By any other historian than Gibbon, who has really no fixed opinion on any character, or question, but, safe in the general truism that the worst men sometimes do right, and the best often do wrong, praises when he wants to round a sentence, and blames when he cannot otherwise edge one—it might have startled us to be here told of the nation which "deserved, assumed, and maintained the honourable name of freemen," that "these undisciplined robbers treated as their natural enemies all the subjects of the empire who possessed any property which they were desirous of acquiring." The first campaign of Julian, which throws both Franks and Alemanni back across the Rhine, but grants the Salian Franks, under solemn oath, their established territory in the Netherlands, must be traced at another time.]

Thus much, of their 'Salian' epithet may be enough; but from the interpretation of the Frankish one we are still as far as ever, and must be content, in the meantime, to stay so, noting however two ideas afterwards entangled with the name, which are of much descriptive importance to us.

32. "The French poet in the first book of his Franciades" (says Mons. Favine; but what poet I know not, nor can enquire) "encounters" (in the sense of en-quarters, or depicts as a herald) certain fables on the name of the French by the adoption and composure of two Gaulish words joyned together, Phere-Encos which signifieth 'Beare-Launce,' (—Shake-Lance, we might perhaps venture to translate,) a lighter weapon than the Spear beginning here to quiver in the hand of its chivalry—and Fere-encos then passing swiftly on the tongue into Francos;"—a derivation not to be adopted, but the idea of the weapon most carefully,—together with this following—that "among the arms of the ancient French, over and beside the Launce, was the Battaile-Axe, which they called Anchon, and moreover, yet to this day, in many Provinces of France, it is termed an Achon, wherewith they served themselves in warre, by throwing it a farre off at joyning with the enemy, onely to discover the man and to cleave his shield. Because this Achon was darted with such violence, as it would cleave the Shield, and compell the Maister thereof to hold down his arm, and being so discovered, as naked or unarmed; it made way for the sooner surprizing of him. It seemeth, that this weapon was proper and particuler to the French Souldior, as well him on foote, as on horsebacke. For this cause they called it Franciscus. Francisca, securis oblonga, quam Franci librabant in Hostes. For the Horseman, beside his shield and Francisca (Armes common, as wee have said, to the Footman), had also the Lance, which being broken, and serving to no further effect, he laid hand on his Francisca, as we learn the use of that weapon in the Archbishop of Tours, his second book, and twenty-seventh chapter."

33. It is satisfactory to find how respectfully these lessons of the Archbishop of Tours were received by the French knights; and curious to see the preferred use of the Francisca by all the best of them—down, not only to Coeur de Lion's time, but even to the day of Poitiers. In the last wrestle of the battle at Poitiers gate, "La, fit le Roy Jehan de sa main, merveilles d'armes, et tenoit une hache de guerre dont bien se deffendoit et combattoit,—si la quartre partie de ses gens luy eussent ressemble, la journee eust ete pour eux." Still more notably, in the episode of fight which Froissart stops to tell just before, between the Sire de Verclef, (on Severn) and the Picard squire Jean de Helennes: the Englishman, losing his sword, dismounts to recover it, on which Helennes casts his own at him with such aim and force "qu'il acconsuit l'Anglois es cuisses, tellement que l'espee entra dedans et le cousit tout parmi, jusqu'au hans."

On this the knight rendering himself, the squire binds his wound, and nurses him, staying fifteen days 'pour l'amour de lui' at Chasteleraut, while his life was in danger; and afterwards carrying him in a litter all the way to his own chastel in Picardy. His ransom however is 6000 nobles—I suppose about 25,000 pounds, of our present estimate; and you may set down for one of the fatallest signs that the days of chivalry are near their darkening, how "devint celuy Escuyer, Chevalier, pour le grand profit qu'il eut du Seigneur de Verclef."

I return gladly to the dawn of chivalry, when, every hour and year, men were becoming more gentle and more wise; while, even through their worst cruelty and error, native qualities of noblest cast may be seen asserting themselves for primal motive, and submitting themselves for future training.

34. We have hitherto got no farther in our notion of a Salian Frank than a glimpse of his two principal weapons,—the shadow of him, however, begins to shape itself to us on the mist of the Brocken, bearing the lance light, passing into the javelin,—but the axe, his woodman's weapon, heavy;—for economical reasons, in scarcity of iron, preferablest of all weapons, giving the fullest swing and weight of blow with least quantity of actual metal, and roughest forging. Gibbon gives them also a 'weighty' sword, suspended from a 'broad' belt: but Gibbon's epithets are always gratis, and the belted sword, whatever its measure, was probably for the leaders only; the belt, itself of gold, the distinction of the Roman Counts, and doubtless adopted from them by the allied Frank leaders, afterwards taking the Pauline mythic meaning of the girdle of Truth—and so finally; the chief mark of Belted Knighthood.

35. The Shield, for all, was round, wielded like a Highlander's target:—armour, presumably, nothing but hard-tanned leather, or patiently close knitted hemp; "Their close apparel," says Mr. Gibbon, "accurately expressed the figure of their limbs," but 'apparel' is only Miltonic-Gibbonian for 'nobody knows what.' He is more intelligible of their persons. "The lofty stature of the Franks, and their blue eyes, denoted a Germanic origin; the warlike barbarians were trained from their earliest youth to run, to leap, to swim, to dart the javelin and battle-axe with unerring aim, to advance without hesitation against a superior enemy, and to maintain either in life or death, the invincible reputation of their ancestors' (vi. 95). For the first time, in 358, appalled by the Emperor Julian's victory at Strasburg, and besieged by him upon the Meuse, a body of six hundred Franks "dispensed with the ancient law which commanded them to conquer or die." "Although they were strongly actuated by the allurements of rapine, they professed a disinterested love of war, which they considered as the supreme honour and felicity of human nature; and their minds and bodies were so hardened by perpetual action that, according to the lively expression of an orator, the snows of winter were as pleasant to them as the flowers of spring" (iii. 220).

36. These mental and bodily virtues, or indurations, were probably universal in the military rank of the nation: but we learn presently, with surprise, of so remarkably 'free' a people, that nobody but the King and royal family might wear their hair to their own liking. The kings wore theirs in flowing ringlets on the back and shoulders,—the Queens, in tresses rippling to their feet,—but all the rest of the nation "were obliged, either by law or custom, to shave the hinder part of their head, to comb their short hair over their forehead, and to content themselves with the ornament of two small whiskers."

37. Moustaches,—Mr. Gibbon means, I imagine: and I take leave also to suppose that the nobles, and noble ladies, might wear such tress and ringlet as became them. But again, we receive unexpectedly embarrassing light on the democratic institutions of the Franks, in being told that "the various trades, the labours of agriculture, and the arts of hunting and fishing, were exercised by servile hands for the emolument of the Sovereign."

'Servile' and 'Emolument,' however, though at first they sound very dreadful and very wrong, are only Miltonic-Gibbonian expressions of the general fact that the Frankish Kings had ploughmen in their fields, employed weavers and smiths to make their robes and swords, hunted with huntsmen, hawked with falconers, and were in other respects tyrannical to the ordinary extent that an English Master of Hounds may be. "The mansion of the long-haired Kings was surrounded with convenient yards and stables for poultry and cattle; the garden was planted with useful vegetables; the magazines filled with corn and wine either for sale or consumption; and the whole administration conducted by the strictest rules of private economy."

38. I have collected these imperfect, and not always extremely consistent, notices of the aspect and temper of the Franks out of Mr. Gibbon's casual references to them during a period of more than two centuries,—and the last passage quoted, which he accompanies with the statement that "one hundred and sixty of these rural palaces were scattered through the provinces of their kingdom," without telling us what kingdom, or at what period, must I think be held descriptive of the general manner and system of their monarchy after the victories of Clovis. But, from the first hour you hear of him, the Frank, closely considered, is always an extremely ingenious, well meaning, and industrious personage;—if eagerly acquisitive, also intelligently conservative and constructive; an element of order and crystalline edification, which is to consummate itself one day, in the aisles of Amiens; and things generally insuperable and impregnable, if the inhabitants of them had been as sound-hearted as their builders, for many a day beyond.

39. But for the present, we must retrace our ground a little; for indeed I have lately observed with compunction, in rereading some of my books for revised issue, that if ever I promise, in one number or chapter, careful consideration of any particular point in the next, the next never does touch upon the promised point at all, but is sure to fix itself passionately on some antithetic, antipathic, or antipodic, point in the opposite hemisphere. This manner of conducting a treatise I find indeed extremely conducive to impartiality and largeness of view; but can conceive it to be—to the general reader—not only disappointing, (if indeed I may flatter myself that I ever interest enough to disappoint), but even liable to confirm in his mind some of the fallacious and extremely absurd insinuations of adverse critics respecting my inconsistency, vacillation, and liability to be affected by changes of the weather in my principles or opinions. I purpose, therefore, in these historical sketches, at least to watch, and I hope partly to correct myself in this fault of promise breaking, and at whatever sacrifice of my variously fluent or re-fluent humour, to tell in each successive chapter in some measure what the reader justifiably expects to be told.

40. I left, merely glanced at, in my opening chapter, the story of the vase of Soissons. It may be found (and it is very nearly the only thing that is to be found respecting the personal life or character of the first Louis) in every cheap popular history of France; with cheap popular moralities engrafted thereon. Had I time to trace it to its first sources, perhaps it might take another aspect. But I give it as you may anywhere find it—asking you only to consider whether even as so read—it may not properly bear a somewhat different moral.

41. The story is, then, that after the battle of Soissons, in the division of Roman, or Gallic spoil, the king wished to have a beautifully wrought silver vase for—'himself,' I was going to write—and in my last chapter did mistakenly infer that he wanted it for his better self,—his Queen. But he wanted it for neither;—it was to restore to St. Remy, that it might remain among the consecrated treasures of Rheims. That is the first point on which the popular histories do not insist, and which one of his warriors claiming equal division of treasure, chose also to ignore. The vase was asked by the King in addition to his own portion, and the Frank knights, while they rendered true obedience to their king as a leader, had not the smallest notion of allowing him what more recent kings call 'Royalties'—taxes on everything they touch. And one of these Frank knights or Counts—a little franker than the rest—and as incredulous of St. Remy's saintship as a Protestant Bishop, or Positivist Philosopher—took upon him to dispute the King's and the Church's claim, in the manner, suppose, of a Liberal opposition in the House of Commons; and disputed it with such security of support by the public opinion of the fifth century, that—the king persisting in his request—the fearless soldier dashed the vase to pieces with his war-axe, exclaiming "Thou shalt have no more than thy portion by lot."

42. It is the first clear assertion of French 'Liberte, Fraternite and Egalite,' supported, then, as now, by the destruction, which is the only possible active operation of "free" personages, on the art they cannot produce.

The king did not continue the quarrel. Cowards will think that he paused in cowardice, and malicious persons, that he paused in malignity. He did pause in anger assuredly; but biding its time, which the anger of a strong man always can, and burn hotter for the waiting, which is one of the chief reasons for Christians being told not to let the sun go down upon it. Precept which Christians now-a-days are perfectly ready to obey, if it is somebody else who has been injured; and indeed, the difficulty in such cases is usually to get them to think of the injury even while the Sun rises on their wrath.[18]

[Footnote 18: Read Mr. Plimsoll's article on coal mines for instance.]

43. The sequel is very shocking indeed—to modern sensibility. I give it in the, if not polished, at least delicately varnished, language of the Pictorial History.

"About a year afterwards, on reviewing his troops, he went to the man who had struck the vase, and examining his arms, complained that they were in bad condition!" (Italics mine) "and threw them" (What? shield and sword?) on the ground. The soldier stooped to recover them; and at that moment the King struck him on the head with his battle-axe, crying 'Thus didst thou to the vase at Soissons.'" The Moral modern historian proceeds to reflect that "this—as an evidence of the condition of the Franks, and of the ties by which they were united, gives but the idea of a band of Robbers and their chief." Which is, indeed, so far as I can myself look into and decipher the nature of things, the Primary idea to be entertained respecting most of the kingly and military organizations in this world, down to our own day; and, (unless perchance it be the Afghans and Zulus who are stealing our lands in England—instead of we theirs, in their several countries.) But concerning the manner of this piece of military execution, I must for the present leave the reader to consider with himself, whether indeed it be less Kingly, or more savage, to strike an uncivil soldier on the head with one's own battle-axe, than, for instance, to strike a person like Sir Thomas More on the neck with an executioner's,—using for the mechanism, and as it were guillotine bar and rope to the blow—the manageable forms of National Law, and the gracefully twined intervention of a polite group of noblemen and bishops.

44. Far darker things have to be told of him than this, as his proud life draws towards the close,—things which, if any of us could see clear through darkness, you should be told in all the truth of them. But we never can know the truth of Sin; for its nature is to deceive alike on the one side the Sinner, on the other the Judge. Diabolic—betraying whether we yield to it, or condemn: Here is Gibbon's sneer—if you care for it; but I gather first from the confused paragraphs which conduct to it, the sentences of praise, less niggard than the Sage of Lausanne usually grants to any hero who has confessed the influence of Christianity.

45. "Clovis, when he was no more than fifteen years of age, succeeded, by his father's death, to the command of the Salian tribe. The narrow limits of his kingdom were confined to the island of the Batavians, with the ancient dioceses of Tournay and Arras; and at the baptism of Clovis, the number of his warriors could not exceed five thousand. The kindred tribes of the Franks who had seated themselves along the Scheldt, the Meuse, the Moselle, and the Rhine, were governed by their independent kings, of the Merovingian race, the equals, the allies, and sometimes the enemies of the Salic Prince. When he first took the field he had neither gold nor silver in his coffers, nor wine and corn in his magazines; but he imitated the example of Caesar, who in the same country had acquired wealth by the sword, and purchased soldiers with the fruits of conquest. The untamed spirit of the Barbarians was taught to acknowledge the advantages of regular discipline. At the annual review of the month of March, their arms were diligently inspected; and when they traversed a peaceful territory they were prohibited from touching a blade of grass. The justice of Clovis was inexorable; and his careless or disobedient soldiers were punished with instant death. It would be superfluous to praise the valour of a Frank; but the valour of Clovis was directed by cool and consummate prudence. In all his transactions with mankind he calculated the weight of interest, of passion, and of opinion; and his measures were sometimes adapted to the sanguinary manners of the Germans, and sometimes moderated by the milder genius of Rome, and Christianity.

46. "But the savage conqueror of Gaul was incapable of examining the proofs of a religion, which depends on the laborious investigation of historic evidence, and speculative theology. He was still more incapable of feeling the mild influence of the Gospel, which persuades and purifies the heart of a genuine convert. His ambitious reign was a perpetual violation of moral and Christian duties: his hands were stained with blood, in peace as well as in war; and, as soon as Clovis had dismissed a synod of the Gallican Church, he calmly assassinated all the princes of the Merovingian race."

47. It is too true; but rhetorically put, in the first place—for we ought to be told how many 'all' the princes were;—in the second place, we must note that, supposing Clovis had in any degree "searched the Scriptures" as presented to the Western world by St. Jerome, he was likely, as a soldier-king, to have thought more of the mission of Joshua[19] and Jehu than of the patience of Christ, whose sufferings he thought rather of avenging than imitating: and the question whether the other Kings of the Franks should either succeed him, or, in envy of his enlarged kingdom, attack and dethrone, was easily in his mind convertible from a personal danger into the chance of the return of the whole nation to idolatry. And, in the last place, his faith in the Divine protection of his cause had been shaken by his defeat before Aries by the Ostrogoths; and the Frank leopard had not so wholly changed his spots as to surrender to an enemy the opportunity of a first spring.

[Footnote 19: The likeness was afterwards taken up by legend, and the walls of Angouleme, after the battle of Poitiers, are said to have fallen at the sound of the trumpets of Clovis. "A miracle," says Gibbon, "which may be reduced to the supposition that some clerical engineer had secretly undermined the foundations of the rampart." I cannot too often warn my honest readers against the modern habit of "reducing" all history whatever to 'the supposition that' ... etc., etc. The legend is of course the natural and easy expression of a metaphor.]

48. Finally, and beyond all these personal questions, the forms of cruelty and subtlety—the former, observe, arising much out of a scorn of pain which was a condition of honour in their women as well as men, are in these savage races all founded on their love of glory in war, which can only be understood by comparing what remains of the same temper in the higher castes of the North American Indians; and, before tracing in final clearness the actual events of the reign of Clovis to their end, the reader will do well to learn this list of the personages of the great Drama, taking to heart the meaning of the name of each, both in its probable effect on the mind of its bearer, and in its fateful expression of the course of their acts, and the consequences of it to future generations.

1. Clovis. Frank form, Hluodoveh. 'Glorious Holiness,' or consecration. Latin Chlodovisus, when baptized by St. Remy, softening afterwards through the centuries into Lhodovisus, Ludovicus, Louis.

2. Albofleda. 'White household fairy'? His youngest sister; married Theodoric (Theutreich, 'People's ruler'), the great King of the Ostrogoths.

3. Clotilde. Hlod-hilda. 'Glorious Battle-maid.' His wife. 'Hilda' first meaning Battle, pure; and then passing into Queen or Maid of Battle. Christianized to Ste Clotilde in France, and Ste Hilda of Whitby cliff.

3. Clotilde. His only daughter. Died for the Catholic faith, under Arian persecution.

4. Childebert. His eldest son by Clotilde, the first Frank King in Paris. 'Battle Splendour,' softening into Hildebert, and then Hildebrandt, as in the Nibelung.

5. Chlodomir. 'Glorious Fame.' His second son by Clotilde.

6. Clotaire. His youngest son by Clotilde; virtually the destroyer of his father's house. 'Glorious Warrior.'

7. Chlodowald. Youngest son of Chlodomir. 'Glorious Power,' afterwards 'St. Cloud.'

49. I will now follow straight, through their light and shadow, the course of Clovis' reign and deeds.

A.D. 481. Crowned, when he was only fifteen. Five years afterwards, he challenges, "in the spirit, and almost in the language of chivalry," the Roman governor Syagrius, holding the district of Rheims and Soissons. "Campum sibi praeparari jussit—he commanded his antagonist to prepare him a battle-field"—see Gibbon's note and reference, chap. xxxviii. (6, 297). The Benedictine abbey of Nogent was afterwards built on the field, marked by a circle of Pagan sepulchres. "Clovis bestowed the adjacent lands of Leuilly and Coucy on the church of Rheims."[20]

[Footnote 20: When?—for this tradition, as well as that of the vase, points to a friendship between Clovis and St. Remy, and a singular respect on the King's side for the Christians of Gaul, though he was not yet himself converted.]

A.D. 485. The Battle of Soissons. Not dated by Gibbon: the subsequent death of Syagrius at the court of (the younger) Alaric, was in 486—take 485 for the battle.

50. A.D. 493. I cannot find any account of the relations between Clovis and the King of Burgundy, the uncle of Clotilde, which preceded his betrothal to the orphan princess. Her uncle, according to the common history, had killed both her father and mother, and compelled her sister to take the veil—motives none assigned, nor authorities. Clotilde herself was pursued on her way to France,[21] and the litter in which she travelled captured, with part of her marriage portion. But the princess herself mounted on horseback, and rode with part of her escort, forward into France, "ordering her attendants to set fire to everything that pertained to her uncle and his subjects which they might meet with on the way."

[Footnote 21: It is a curious proof of the want in vulgar historians of the slightest sense of the vital interest of anything they tell, that neither in Gibbon, nor in Messrs. Bussey and Gaspey, nor in the elaborate 'Histoire des Villes de France,' can I find, with the best research my winter's morning allows, what city was at this time the capital of Burgundy, or at least in which of its four nominal capitals,—Dijon, Besancon, Geneva, and Vienne,—Clotilde was brought up. The evidence seems to me in favour of Vienne—(called always by Messrs. B. and G., 'Vienna,' with what effect on the minds of their dimly geographical readers I cannot say)—the rather that Clotilde's mother is said to have been "thrown into the Rhone with a stone round her neck." The author of the introduction to 'Bourgogne' in the 'Histoire des Villes' is so eager to get his little spiteful snarl at anything like religion anywhere, that he entirely forgets the existence of the first queen of France,—never names her, nor, as such, the place of her birth,—but contributes only to the knowledge of the young student this beneficial quota, that Gondeband, "plus politique que guerrier, trouva au milieu de ses controverses theologiques avec Avitus, eveque de Vienne, le temps de faire mourir ses trois freres et de recueillir leur heritage."

The one broad fact which my own readers will find it well to remember is that Burgundy, at this time, by whatever king or victor tribe its inhabitants may be subdued, does practically include the whole of French Switzerland, and even of the German, as far east as Vindonissa:—the Reuss, from Vindonissa through Lucerne to the St. Gothard being its effective eastern boundary; that westward—it meant all Jura, and the plains of the Saone; and southward, included all Savoy and Dauphine. According to the author of 'La Suisse Historique' Clotilde was first addressed by Clovis's herald disguised as a beggar, while she distributed alms at the gate of St. Pierre at Geneva; and her departure and pursued flight into France were from Dijon.]

51. The fact is not chronicled, usually, among the sayings or doings of the Saints: but the punishment of Kings by destroying the property of their subjects, is too well recognized a method of modern Christian warfare to allow our indignation to burn hot against Clotilde; driven, as she was, hard by grief and wrath. The years of her youth are not counted to us; Clovis was already twenty-seven, and for three years maintained the faith of his ancestral religion against all the influence of his queen.

52. A.D. 496. I did not in the opening chapter attach nearly enough importance to the battle of Tolbiac, thinking of it as merely compelling the Alemanni to recross the Rhine, and establishing the Frank power on its western bank. But infinitely wider results are indicated in the short sentence with which Gibbon closes his account of the battle. "After the conquest of the western provinces, the Franks alone retained their ancient possessions beyond the Rhine. They gradually subdued and civilized the exhausted countries as far as the Elbe and the mountains of Bohemia; and the peace of Europe was secured by the obedience of Germany."

53. For, in the south, Theodoric had already "sheathed the sword in the pride of victory and the vigour of his age—and his farther reign of three and thirty years was consecrated to the duties of civil government." Even when his son-in-law, Alaric, fell by Clovis' hand in the battle of Poitiers, Theodoric was content to check the Frank power at Arles, without pursuing his success, and to protect his infant grandchild, correcting at the same time some abuses in the civil government of Spain. So that the healing sovereignty of the great Goth was established from Sicily to the Danube—and from Sirmium to the Atlantic ocean.

54. Thus, then, at the close of the fifth century, you have Europe divided simply by her watershed; and two Christian kings reigning, with entirely beneficent and healthy power—one in the north—one in the south—the mightiest and worthiest of them married to the other's youngest sister: a saint queen in the north—and a devoted and earnest Catholic woman, queen mother in the south. It is a conjunction of things memorable enough in the Earth's history,—much to be thought of, O fast whirling reader, if ever, out of the crowd of pent up cattle driven across Rhine, or Adige, you can extricate yourself for an hour, to walk peacefully out of the south gate of Cologne, or across Fra Giocondo's bridge at Verona—and so pausing look through the clear air across the battlefield of Tolbiac to the blue Drachenfels, or across the plain of St. Ambrogio to the mountains of Garda. For there were fought—if you will think closely—the two victor-battles of the Christian world. Constantine's only gave changed form and dying colour to the falling walls of Rome; but the Frank and Gothic races, thus conquering and thus ruled, founded the arts and established the laws which gave to all future Europe her joy, and her virtue. And it is lovely to see how, even thus early, the Feudal chivalry depended for its life on the nobleness of its womanhood. There was no vision seen, or alleged, at Tolbiac. The King prayed simply to the God of Clotilde. On the morning of the battle of Verona, Theodoric visited the tent of his mother and his sister, "and requested that on the most illustrious festival of his life, they would adorn him with the rich garments which they had worked with their own hands."

55. But over Clovis, there was extended yet another influence—greater than his queen's. When his kingdom was first extended to the Loire, the shepherdess of Nanterre was already aged,—no torch-bearing maid of battle, like Clotilde, no knightly leader of deliverance like Jeanne, but grey in meekness of wisdom, and now "filling more and more with crystal light." Clovis's father had known her; he himself made her his friend, and when he left Paris on the campaign of Poitiers, vowed that if victorious, he would build a Christian church on the hills of Seine. He returned in victory, and with St. Genevieve at his side, stood on the site of the ruined Roman Thermae, just above the "Isle" of Paris, to fulfil his vow: and to design the limits of the foundations of the first metropolitan church of Frankish Christendom.

The King "gave his battle-axe the swing," and tossed it with his full force.

Measuring with its flight also, the place of his own grave, and of Clotilde's, and St. Genevieve's.

There they rested, and rest,—in soul,—together. "La Colline tout entiere porte encore le nom de la patronne de Paris; une petite rue obscure a garde celui du Roi Conquerant."



"OUR FATHERS HAVE TOLD US."

ADVICE.

The three chapters[22] of "Our Fathers have told us," now submitted to the public, are enough to show the proposed character and tendencies of the work, to which, contrary to my usual custom, I now invite subscription, because the degree in which I can increase its usefulness by engraved illustration must greatly depend on the known number of its supporters.

[Footnote 22: Viz., Chapters I. and II., and the separate travellers' edition of Chapter IV.]

I do not recognize, in the present state of my health, any reason to fear more loss of general power, whether in conception or industry, than is the proper and appointed check of an old man's enthusiasm: of which, however, enough remains in me, to warrant my readers against the abandonment of a purpose entertained already for twenty years.

The work, if I live to complete it, will consist of ten parts, each taking up some local division of Christian history, and gathering, towards their close, into united illustration of the power of the Church in the Thirteenth Century.

The next chapter, which I hope to issue soon after Christmas, completes the first part, descriptive of the early Frank power, and of its final skill, in the Cathedral of Amiens.

The second part, "Ponte della Pietra," will, I hope, do more for Theodoric and Verona than I have been able to do for Clovis and the first capital of France.

The third, "Ara Celi," will trace the foundations of the Papal power.

The fourth, "Ponte-a-Mare," and fifth, "Ponte Vecchio," will only with much difficulty gather into brief form what I have by me of scattered materials respecting Pisa and Florence.

The sixth, "Valle Crucis," will be occupied with the monastic architecture of England and Wales.

The seventh, "The Springs of Eure," will be wholly given to the cathedral of Chartres.

The eighth, "Domremy," to that of Rouen and the schools of architecture which it represents.

The ninth, "The Bay of Uri," to the pastoral forms of Catholicism, reaching to our own times.

And the tenth, "The Bells of Cluse," to the pastoral Protestantism of Savoy, Geneva, and the Scottish Border.

Each part will consist of four sections only; and one of them, the fourth, will usually be descriptive of some monumental city or cathedral, the resultant and remnant of the religious power examined in the preparatory chapters.

One illustration at least will be given with each chapter,[23] and drawings made for others, which will be placed at once in the Sheffield museum for public reference, and engraved as I find support, or opportunity for binding with the completed work.

[Footnote 23: The first plate for the Bible of Amiens, curiously enough, failed in the engraving; and I shall probably have to etch it myself. It will be issued with the fourth, in the full-size edition of the fourth chapter.]

As in the instance of Chapter IV. of this first part, a smaller edition of the descriptive chapters will commonly be printed in reduced form for travellers and non-subscribers; but otherwise, I intend this work to be furnished to subscribers only.



CHAPTER III.

THE LION TAMER.

1. It has been often of late announced as a new discovery, that man is a creature of circumstances; and the fact has been pressed upon our notice, in the hope, which appears to some people so pleasing, of being able at last to resolve into a succession of splashes in mud, or whirlwinds in air, the circumstances answerable for his creation. But the more important fact, that his nature is not levelled, like a mosquito's, to the mists of a marsh, nor reduced, like a mole's, beneath the crumblings of a burrow, but has been endowed with sense to discern, and instinct to adopt, the conditions which will make of it the best that can be, is very necessarily ignored by philosophers who propose, as a beautiful fulfilment of human destinies, a life entertained by scientific gossip, in a cellar lighted by electric sparks, warmed by tubular inflation, drained by buried rivers, and fed, by the ministry of less learned and better provisioned races, with extract of beef, and potted crocodile.

2. From these chemically analytic conceptions of a Paradise in catacombs, undisturbed in its alkaline or acid virtues by the dread of Deity, or hope of futurity, I know not how far the modern reader may willingly withdraw himself for a little time, to hear of men who, in their darkest and most foolish day, sought by their labour to make the desert as the garden of the Lord, and by their love to become worthy of permission to live with Him for ever. It has nevertheless been only by such toil, and in such hope, that, hitherto, the happiness, skill, or virtue of man have been possible: and even on the verge of the new dispensation, and promised Canaan, rich in beatitudes of iron, steam, and fire, there are some of us, here and there, who may pause in filial piety to look back towards that wilderness of Sinai in which their fathers worshipped and died.



3. Admitting then, for the moment, that the main streets of Manchester, the district immediately surrounding the Bank in London, and the Bourse and Boulevards of Paris, are already part of the future kingdom of Heaven, when Earth shall be all Bourse and Boulevard,—the world of which our fathers tell us was divided to them, as you already know, partly by climates, partly by races, partly by times; and the 'circumstances' under which a man's soul was given to him, had to be considered under these three heads:—In what climate is he? Of what race? At what time?

He can only be what these conditions permit. With appeal to these, he is to be heard;—understood, if it may be;—judged, by our love, first—by our pity, if he need it—by our humility, finally and always.

4. To this end, it is needful evidently that we should have truthful maps of the world to begin with, and truthful maps of our own hearts to end with; neither of these maps being easily drawn at any time, and perhaps least of all now—when the use of a map is chiefly to exhibit hotels and railroads; and humility is held the disagreeablest and meanest of the Seven mortal Sins.

5. Thus, in the beginning of Sir Edward Creasy's History of England, you find a map purporting to exhibit the possessions of the British Nation—illustrating the extremely wise and courteous behaviour of Mr. Fox to a Frenchman of Napoleon's suite, in "advancing to a terrestrial globe of unusual magnitude and distinctness, spreading his arms round it, over both the oceans and both the Indies," and observing, in this impressive attitude, that "while Englishmen live, they overspread the whole world, and clasp it in the circle of their power."

6. Fired by Mr. Fox's enthusiasm,—the otherwise seldom fiery—Sir Edward proceeds to tell us that "our island home is the favourite domicile of freedom, empire and glory," without troubling himself, or his readers, to consider how long the nations over whom our freedom is imperious, and in whose shame is our glory, may be satisfied in that arrangement of the globe and its affairs; or may be even at present convinced of their degraded position in it by his method of its delineation.

For, the map being drawn on Mercator's projection, represents therefore the British dominions in North America as twice the size of the States, and considerably larger than all South America put together: while the brilliant crimson with which all our landed property is coloured cannot but impress the innocent reader with the idea of a universal flush of freedom and glory throughout all those acres and latitudes. So that he is scarcely likely to cavil at results so marvellous by inquiring into the nature and completeness of our government at any particular place,—for instance in Ireland, in the Hebrides, or at the Cape.

7. In the closing chapter of the first volume of 'The Laws of Fesole' I have laid down the mathematical principles of rightly drawing maps;—principles which for many reasons it is well that my young readers should learn; the fundamental one being that you cannot flatten the skin of an orange without splitting it, and must not, if you draw countries on the unsplit skin, stretch them afterwards to fill the gaps.

The British pride of wealth which does not deny itself the magnificent convenience of penny Walter Scotts and penny Shakespeares, may assuredly, in its future greatness, possess itself also of penny universes, conveniently spinnable on their axes. I shall therefore assume that my readers can look at a round globe, while I am talking of the world; and at a properly reduced drawing of its surfaces, when I am talking of a country.

8. Which, if my reader can at present do—or at least refer to a fairly drawn double-circle map of the globe with converging meridians—I will pray him next to observe, that, although the old division of the world into four quarters is now nearly effaced by emigration and Atlantic cable, yet the great historic question about the globe is not how it is divided, here and there, by ins and outs of land or sea; but how it is divided into zones all round, by irresistible laws of light and air. It is often a matter of very minor interest to know whether a man is an American or African, a European or an Asiatic. But it is a matter of extreme and final interest to know if he be a Brazilian or a Patagonian, a Japanese or a Samoyede.

9. In the course of the last chapter, I asked the reader to hold firmly the conception of the great division of climate, which separated the wandering races of Norway and Siberia from the calmly resident nations of Britain, Gaul, Germany, and Dacia.

Fasten now that division well home in your mind, by drawing, however rudely, the course of the two rivers, little thought of by common geographers, but of quite unspeakable importance in human history, the Vistula and the Dniester.

10. They rise within thirty miles of each other,[24] and each runs, not counting ins and outs, its clear three hundred miles,—the Vistula to the north-east, the Dniester to the south-west: the two of them together cut Europe straight across, at the broad neck of it,—and, more deeply looking at the thing, they divide Europe, properly so called—Europa's own, and Jove's,—the small educationable, civilizable, and more or less mentally rational fragment of the globe, from the great Siberian wilderness, Cis-Ural and Trans-Ural; the inconceivable chaotic space, occupied datelessly by Scythians, Tartars, Huns, Cossacks, Bears, Ermines, and Mammoths, in various thickness of hide, frost of brain, and woe of abode—or of unabiding. Nobody's history worth making out, has anything to do with them; for the force of Scandinavia never came round by Finland at all, but always sailed or paddled itself across the Baltic, or down the rocky west coast; and the Siberian and Russian ice-pressure merely drives the really memorable races into greater concentration, and kneads them up in fiercer and more necessitous exploring masses. But by those exploring masses, of true European birth, our own history was fashioned for ever; and, therefore, these two truncating and guarding rivers are to be marked on your map of Europe with supreme clearness: the Vistula, with Warsaw astride of it half way down, and embouchure in Baltic,—the Dniester, in Euxine, flowing each of them, measured arrow-straight, as far as from Edinburgh to London, with windings,[25] the Vistula six hundred miles, and the Dniester five—count them together for a thousand miles of moat, between Europe and the Desert, reaching from Dantzic to Odessa.

[Footnote 24: Taking the 'San' branch of upper Vistula.]

[Footnote 25: Note, however, generally that the strength of a river, caeteris paribus, is to be estimated by its straight course, windings being almost always caused by flats in which it can receive no tributaries.]

11. Having got your Europe moated off into this manageable and comprehensible space, you are next to fix the limits which divide the four Gothic countries, Britain, Gaul, Germany, and Dacia, from the four Classic countries, Spain, Italy, Greece, and Lydia.

There is no other generally opponent term to 'Gothic' but 'Classic': and I am content to use it, for the sake of practical breadth and clearness, though its precise meaning for a little while remains unascertained. Only get the geography well into your mind, and the nomenclature will settle itself at its leisure.

12. Broadly, then, you have sea between Britain and Spain—Pyrenees between Gaul and Spain—Alps between Germany and Italy—Danube between Dacia and Greece. You must consider everything south of the Danube as Greek, variously influenced from Athens on one side, Byzantium on the other: then, across the AEgean, you have the great country absurdly called Asia Minor, (for we might just as well call Greece, Europe Minor, or Cornwall, England Minor,) but which is properly to be remembered as 'Lydia,' the country which infects with passion, and tempts with wealth; which taught the Lydian measure in music and softened the Greek language on its border into Ionic; which gave to ancient history the tale of Troy, and to Christian history, the glow, and the decline, of the Seven Churches.

13. Opposite to these four countries in the south, but separated from them either by sea or desert, are another four, as easily remembered—Morocco, Libya, Egypt, and Arabia.

Morocco, virtually consisting of the chain of Atlas and the coasts depending on it, may be most conveniently thought of as including the modern Morocco and Algeria, with the Canaries as a dependent group of islands.

Libya, in like manner, will include the modern Tunis and Tripoli: it will begin on the west with St. Augustine's town of Hippo; and its coast is colonized from Tyre and Greece, dividing it into the two districts of Carthage and Cyrene. Egypt, the country of the River, and Arabia, the country of no River, are to be thought of as the two great southern powers of separate Religion.

14. You have thus, easily and clearly memorable, twelve countries, distinct evermore by natural laws, and forming three zones from north to south, all healthily habitable—but the races of the northernmost, disciplined in endurance of cold; those of the central zone, perfected by the enjoyable suns alike of summer and winter; those of the southern zone, trained to endurance of heat. Writing them now in tabular view,

Britain Gaul Germany Dacia Spain Italy Greece Lydia Morocco Libya Egypt Arabia,

you have the ground of all useful profane history mapped out in the simplest terms; and then, as the fount of inspiration, for all these countries, with the strength which every soul that has possessed, has held sacred and supernatural, you have last to conceive perfectly the small hill district of the Holy Land, with Philistia and Syria on its flanks, both of them chastising forces; but Syria, in the beginning, herself the origin of the chosen race—"A Syrian ready to perish was my father"—and the Syrian Rachel being thought of always as the true mother of Israel.

15. And remember, in all future study of the relations of these countries, you must never allow your mind to be disturbed by the accidental changes of political limit. No matter who rules a country, no matter what it is officially called, or how it is formally divided, eternal bars and doors are set to it by the mountains and seas, eternal laws enforced over it by the clouds and stars. The people that are born on it are its people, be they a thousand times again and again conquered, exiled, or captive. The stranger cannot be its king, the invader cannot be its possessor; and, although just laws, maintained whether by the people or their conquerors, have always the appointed good and strength of justice, nothing is permanently helpful to any race or condition of men but the spirit that is in their own hearts, kindled by the love of their native land.

16. Of course, in saying that the invader cannot be the possessor of any country, I speak only of invasion such as that by the Vandals of Libya, or by ourselves of India; where the conquering race does not become permanently inhabitant. You are not to call Libya Vandalia, nor India England, because these countries are temporarily under the rule of Vandals and English; neither Italy Gothland under Ostrogoths, nor England Denmark under Canute. National character varies as it fades under invasion or in corruption; but if ever it glows again into a new life, that life must be tempered by the earth and sky of the country itself. Of the twelve names of countries now given in their order, only one will be changed as we advance in our history;—Gaul will properly become France when the Franks become her abiding inhabitants. The other eleven primary names will serve us to the end.

17. With a moment's more patience, therefore, glancing to the far East, we shall have laid the foundations of all our own needful geography. As the northern kingdoms are moated from the Scythian desert by the Vistula, so the southern are moated from the dynasties properly called 'Oriental' by the Euphrates; which, "partly sunk beneath the Persian Gulf, reaches from the shores of Beloochistan and Oman to the mountains of Armenia, and forms a huge hot-air funnel, the base" (or mouth) "of which is on the tropics, while its extremity reaches thirty-seven degrees of northern latitude. Hence it comes that the Semoom itself (the specific and gaseous Semoom) pays occasional visits to Mosoul and Djezeerat Omer, while the thermometer at Bagdad attains in summer an elevation capable of staggering the belief of even an old Indian."[26]

[Footnote 26: Sir F. Palgrave, 'Arabia,' vol. ii., p. 155. I gratefully adopt in the next paragraph his division of Asiatic nations, p. 160.]

18. This valley in ancient days formed the kingdom of Assyria, as the valley of the Nile formed that of Egypt. In the work now before us, we have nothing to do with its people, who were to the Jews merely a hostile power of captivity, inexorable as the clay of their walls, or the stones of their statues; and, after the birth of Christ, the marshy valley is no more than a field of battle between West and East. Beyond the great river,—Persia, India, and China, form the southern 'Oriens.' Persia is properly to be conceived as reaching from the Persian Gulf to the mountain chains which flank and feed the Indus; and is the true vital power of the East in the days of Marathon: but it has no influence on Christian history except through Arabia; while, of the northern Asiatic tribes, Mede, Bactrian, Parthian, and Scythian, changing into Turk and Tartar, we need take no heed until they invade us in our own historic territory.

19. Using therefore the terms 'Gothic' and 'Classic' for broad distinction of the northern and central zones of this our own territory, we may conveniently also use the word 'Arab'[27] for the whole southern zone. The influence of Egypt vanishes soon after the fourth century, while that of Arabia, powerful from the beginning, rises in the sixth into an empire whose end we have not seen. And you may most rightly conceive the religious principle which is the base of that empire, by remembering, that while the Jews forfeited their prophetic power by taking up the profession of usury over the whole earth, the Arabs returned to the simplicity of prophecy in its beginning by the well of Hagar, and are not opponents to Christianity; but only to the faults or follies of Christians. They keep still their faith in the one God who spoke to Abraham their father; and are His children in that simplicity, far more truly than the nominal Christians who lived, and live, only to dispute in vociferous council, or in frantic schism, the relations of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.

[Footnote 27: Gibbon's fifty-sixth chapter begins with a sentence which may be taken as the epitome of the entire history we have to investigate: "The three great nations of the world, the Greeks, the Saracens, and the Franks, encountered each other on the theatre of Italy." I use the more general word, Goths, instead of Franks; and the more accurate word, Arab, for Saracen; but otherwise, the reader will observe that the division is the same as mine. Gibbon does not recognize the Roman people as a nation—but only the Roman power as an empire.]

20. Trusting my reader then in future to retain in his mind without confusion the idea of the three zones, Gothic, Classic, and Arab, each divided into four countries, clearly recognizable through all ages of remote or recent history;—I must farther, at once, simplify for him the idea of the Roman Empire (see note to last paragraph,) in the manner of its affecting them. Its nominal extent, temporary conquests, civil dissensions, or internal vices, are scarcely of any historical moment at all; the real Empire is effectual only as an exponent of just law, military order, and mechanical art, to untrained races, and as a translation of Greek thought into less diffused and more tenable scheme for them. The Classic zone, from the beginning to the end of its visible authority, is composed of these two elements—Greek imagination, with Roman order: and the divisions or dislocations of the third and fourth century are merely the natural apparitions of their differences, when the political system which concealed them was tested by Christianity. It seems almost wholly lost sight of by ordinary historians, that, in the wars of the last Romans with the Goths, the great Gothic captains were all Christians; and that the vigorous and naive form which the dawning faith took in their minds is a more important subject of investigation, by far, than the inevitable wars which followed the retirement of Diocletian, or the confused schisms and crimes of the lascivious court of Constantine. I am compelled, however, to notice the terms in which the last arbitrary dissolutions of the empire took place, that they may illustrate, instead of confusing, the arrangement of the nations which I would fasten in your memory.

21. In the middle of the fourth century you have, politically, what Gibbon calls "the final division of the Eastern and Western Empires." This really means only that the Emperor Valentinian, yielding, though not without hesitation, to the feeling now confirmed in the legions that the Empire was too vast to be held by a single person, takes his brother for his colleague, and divides, not, truly speaking, their authority, but their attention, between the east and the west. To his brother Valens he assigns the extremely vague "Praefecture of the East, from the lower Danube to the confines of Persia," while for his own immediate government he reserves the "warlike praefectures of Illyricum, Italy, and Gaul, from the extremity of Greece to the Caledonian rampart, and from the rampart of Caledonia to the foot of Mount Atlas." That is to say, in less poetical cadence, (Gibbon had better have put his history into hexameters at once,) Valentinian kept under his own watch the whole of Roman Europe and Africa, and left Lydia and Caucasus to his brother. Lydia and Caucasus never did, and never could, form an Eastern Empire,—they were merely outside dependencies, useful for taxation in peace, dangerous by their multitudes in war. There never was, from the seventh century before Christ to the seventh after Christ, but one Roman Empire, which meant, the power over humanity of such men as Cincinnatus and Agricola; it expires as the race and temper of these expire; the nominal extent of it, or brilliancy at any moment, is no more than the reflection, farther or nearer upon the clouds, of the flames of an altar whose fuel was of noble souls. There is no true date for its division; there is none for its destruction. Whether Dacian Probus or Noric Odoacer be on the throne of it, the force of its living principle alone is to be watched—remaining, in arts, in laws, and in habits of thought, dominant still in Europe down to the twelfth century;—in language and example, dominant over all educated men to this hour.

22. But in the nominal division of it by Valentinian, let us note Gibbon's definition (I assume it to be his, not the Emperor's) of European Roman Empire into Illyricum, Italy, and Gaul. I have already said you must hold everything south of the Danube for Greek. The two chief districts immediately south of the stream are upper and lower Moesia, consisting of the slope of the Thracian mountains northward to the river, with the plains between it and them. This district you must notice for its importance in forming the Moeso-Gothic alphabet, in which "the Greek is by far the principal element",[28] giving sixteen letters out of the twenty-four. The Gothic invasion under the reign of Valens is the first that establishes a Teutonic nation within the frontier of the empire; but they only thereby bring themselves more directly under its spiritual power. Their bishop, Ulphilas, adopts this Moesian alphabet, two-thirds Greek, for his translation of the Bible, and it is universally disseminated and perpetuated by that translation, until the extinction or absorption of the Gothic race.

[Footnote 28: Milman, 'Hist., of Christianity,' vol. iii. p. 36.]

23. South of the Thracian mountains you have Thrace herself, and the countries confusedly called Dalmatia and Illyria, forming the coast of the Adriatic, and reaching inwards and eastwards to the mountain watershed. I have never been able to form a clear notion myself of the real character of the people of these districts, in any given period; but they are all to be massed together as northern Greek, having more or less of Greek blood and dialect according to their nearness to Greece proper; though neither sharing in her philosophy, nor submitting to her discipline. But it is of course far more accurate, in broad terms, to speak of these Illyrian, Moesian, and Macedonian districts as all Greek, than with Gibbon or Valentinian to speak of Greece and Macedonia as all Illyrian.[29]

[Footnote 29: I find the same generalization expressed to the modern student under the term 'Balkan Peninsula,' extinguishing every ray and trace of past history at once.]

24. In the same imperial or poetical generalization, we find England massed with France under the term Gaul, and bounded by the "Caledonian rampart." Whereas in our own division, Caledonia, Hibernia, and Wales, are from the first considered as essential parts of Britain,[30] and the link with the continent is to be conceived as formed by the settlement of Britons in Brittany, and not at all by Roman authority beyond the Humber.

[Footnote 30: Gibbon's more deliberate statement its clear enough. "From the coast or the extremity of Caithness and Ulster, the memory of Celtic origin was distinctly preserved in the perpetual resemblance of languages, religion, and manners, and the peculiar character of the British tribes might be naturally ascribed to the influence of accidental and local circumstances." The Lowland Scots, "wheat eaters" or Wanderers, and the Irish, are very positively identified by Gibbon at the time our own history begins. "It is certain" (italics his, not mine) "that in the declining age of the Roman Empire, Caledonia, Ireland, and the Isle of Man, were inhabited by the Scots."—Chap. 25, vol. iv., p. 279.

The higher civilization and feebler courage of the Lowland English rendered them either the victims of Scotland, or the grateful subjects of Rome. The mountaineers, Pict among the Grampians, or of their own colour in Cornwall and Wales, have never been either instructed or subdued, and remain to this day the artless and fearless strength of the British race.]

25. Thus, then, once more reviewing our order of countries, and noting only that the British Islands, though for the most part thrown by measured degree much north of the rest of the north zone, are brought by the influence of the Gulf stream into the same climate;—you have, at the time when our history of Christianity begins, the Gothic zone yet unconverted, and having not yet even heard of the new faith. You have the Classic zone variously and increasingly conscious of it, disputing with it, striving to extinguish it—and your Arab zone, the ground and sustenance of it, encompassing the Holy Land with the warmth of its own wings, and cherishing there—embers of phoenix fire over all the earth,—the hope of Resurrection.

26. What would have been the course, or issue, of Christianity, had it been orally preached only, and unsupported by its poetical literature, might be the subject of deeply instructive speculation—if a historian's duty were to reflect instead of record. The power of the Christian faith was however, in the fact of it, always founded on the written prophecies and histories of the Bible; and on the interpretations of their meaning, given by the example, far more than by the precept, of the great monastic orders. The poetry and history of the Syrian Testaments were put within their reach by St. Jerome, while the virtue and efficiency of monastic life are all expressed, and for the most part summed, in the rule of St. Benedict. To understand the relation of the work of these two men to the general order of the Church, is quite the first requirement for its farther intelligible history.

Gibbon's thirty-seventh chapter professes to give an account of the 'Institution of the Monastic Life' in the third century. But the monastic life had been instituted somewhat earlier, and by many prophets and kings. By Jacob, when he laid the stone for his pillow; by Moses, when he drew aside to see the burning bush; by David, before he had left "those few sheep in the wilderness"; and by the prophet who "was in the deserts till the time of his showing unto Israel." Its primary "institution," for Europe, was Numa's, in that of the Vestal Virgins, and College of Augurs; founded on the originally Etrurian and derived Roman conception of pure life dedicate to the service of God, and practical wisdom dependent on His guidance.[31]

[Footnote 31: I should myself mark as the fatallest instant in the decline of the Roman Empire, Julian's rejection of the counsel of the Augurs. "For the last time, the Etruscan Haruspices accompanied a Roman Emperor, but by a singular fatality their adverse interpretation by the signs of heaven was disdained, and Julian followed the advice of the philosophers, who coloured their predictions with the bright hues of the Emperor's ambition." (Milman, Hist. of Christianity, chap. vi.)]

The form which the monastic spirit took in later times depended far more on the corruption of the common world, from which it was forced to recoil either in indignation or terror, than on any change brought about by Christianity in the ideal of human virtue and happiness.

27. "Egypt" (Mr. Gibbon thus begins to account for the new Institution!), "the fruitful parent of superstition, afforded the first example of monastic life." Egypt had her superstitions, like other countries; but was so little the parent of superstition that perhaps no faith among the imaginative races of the world has been so feebly missionary as hers. She never prevailed on even the nearest of her neighbours to worship cats or cobras with her; and I am alone, to my belief, among recent scholars, in maintaining Herodotus' statement of her influence on the archaic theology of Greece. But that influence, if any, was formative and delineative: not ritual: so that in no case, and in no country, was Egypt the parent of Superstition: while she was beyond all dispute, for all people and to all time, the parent of Geometry, Astronomy, Architecture, and Chivalry. She was, in its material and technic elements, the mistress of Literature, showing authors who before could only scratch on wax and wood, how to weave paper and engrave porphyry. She was the first exponent of the law of Judgment after Death for Sin. She was the Tutress of Moses; and the Hostess of Christ.

28. It is both probable and natural that, in such a country, the disciples of any new spiritual doctrine should bring it to closer trial than was possible among the illiterate warriors, or in the storm-vexed solitudes of the North; yet it is a thoughtless error to deduce the subsequent power of cloistered fraternity from the lonely passions of Egyptian monachism. The anchorites of the first three centuries vanish like feverish spectres, when the rational, merciful, and laborious laws of Christian societies are established; and the clearly recognizable rewards of heavenly solitude are granted to those only who seek the Desert for its redemption.

29. 'The clearly recognizable rewards,' I repeat, and with cautious emphasis. No man has any data for estimating, far less right of judging, the results of a life of resolute self-denial, until he has had the courage to try it himself, at least for a time: but I believe no reasonable person will wish, and no honest person dare, to deny the benefits he has occasionally felt both in mind and body, during periods of accidental privation from luxury, or exposure to danger. The extreme vanity of the modern Englishman in making a momentary Stylites of himself on the top of a Horn or an Aiguille, and his occasional confession of a charm in the solitude of the rocks, of which he modifies nevertheless the poignancy with his pocket newspaper, and from the prolongation of which he thankfully escapes to the nearest table-d'hote, ought to make us less scornful of the pride, and more intelligent of the passion, in which the mountain anchorites of Arabia and Palestine condemned themselves to lives of seclusion and suffering, which were comforted only by supernatural vision, or celestial hope. That phases of mental disease are the necessary consequence of exaggerated and independent emotion of any kind must, of course, be remembered in reading the legends of the wilderness; but neither physicians nor moralists have yet attempted to distinguish the morbid states of intellect[32] which are extremities of noble passion, from those which are the punishments of ambition, avarice, or lasciviousness.

[Footnote 32: Gibbon's hypothetical conclusion respecting the effects of self-mortification, and his following historical statement, must be noted as in themselves containing the entire views of the modern philosophies and policies which have since changed the monasteries of Italy into barracks, and the churches of France into magazines. "This voluntary martyrdom must have gradually destroyed the sensibility, both of mind and body; nor can it be presumed that the fanatics who torment themselves, are capable of any lively affection for the rest of mankind. A cruel unfeeling temper has characterized the monks of every age and country."

How much of penetration, or judgment, this sentence exhibits, I hope will become manifest to the reader as I unfold before him the actual history of his faith; but being, I suppose, myself one of the last surviving witnesses of the character of recluse life as it still existed in the beginning of this century, I can point to the portraiture of it given by Scott in the introduction to 'The Monastery' as one perfect and trustworthy, to the letter and to the spirit; and for myself can say, that the most gentle, refined, and in the deepest sense amiable, phases of character I have ever known, have been either those of monks, or of servants trained in the Catholic Faith.]

30. Setting all questions of this nature aside for the moment, my younger readers need only hold the broad fact that during the whole of the fourth century, multitudes of self-devoted men led lives of extreme misery and poverty in the effort to obtain some closer knowledge of the Being and Will of God. We know, in any available clearness, neither what they suffered, nor what they learned. We cannot estimate the solemnizing or reproving power of their examples on the less zealous Christian world; and only God knows how far their prayers for it were heard, or their persons accepted. This only we may observe with reverence, that among all their numbers, none seemed to have repented their chosen manner of existence; none perish by melancholy or suicide; their self-adjudged sufferings are never inflicted in the hope of shortening the lives they embitter or purify; and the hours of dream or meditation, on mountain or in cave, appear seldom to have dragged so heavily as those which, without either vision or reflection, we pass ourselves, on the embankment and in the tunnel.

31. But whatever may be alleged, after ultimate and honest scrutiny, of the follies or virtues of anchorite life, we are unjust to Jerome if we think of him as its introducer into the West of Europe. He passed through it himself as a phase of spiritual discipline; but he represents, in his total nature and final work, not the vexed inactivity of the Eremite, but the eager industry of a benevolent tutor and pastor. His heart is in continual fervour of admiration or of hope—remaining to the last as impetuous as a child's, but as affectionate; and the discrepancies of Protestant objection by which his character has been confused, or concealed, may be gathered into some dim picture of his real self when once we comprehend the simplicity of his faith, and sympathise a little with the eager charity which can so easily be wounded into indignation, and is never repressed by policy.

32. The slight trust which can be placed in modern readings of him, as they now stand, may be at once proved by comparing the two passages in which Milman has variously guessed at the leading principles of his political conduct. "Jerome began (!) and ended his career as a monk of Palestine; he attained, he aspired to, no dignity in the Church. Though ordained a presbyter against his will, he escaped the episcopal dignity which was forced upon his distinguished contemporaries." ('History of Christianity,' Book III.)

"Jerome cherished the secret hope, if it was not the avowed object of his ambition, to succeed Damasus as Bishop of Rome. Is the rejection of an aspirant so singularly unfit for the station, from his violent passions, his insolent treatment of his adversaries, his utter want of self-command, his almost unrivalled faculty of awakening hatred, to be attributed to the sagacious and intuitive wisdom of Rome?" ('History of Latin Christianity,' Book I., chap. ii.)

33. You may observe, as an almost unexceptional character in the "sagacious wisdom" of the Protestant clerical mind, that it instinctively assumes the desire of power and place not only to be universal in Priesthood, but to be always purely selfish in the ground of it. The idea that power might possibly be desired for the sake of its benevolent use, so far as I remember, does not once occur in the pages of any ecclesiastical historian of recent date. In our own reading of past ages we will, with the reader's permission, very calmly put out of court all accounts of "hopes cherished in secret"; and pay very small attention to the reasons for mediaeval conduct which appear logical to the rationalist, and probable to the politician.[33] We concern ourselves only with what these singular and fantastic Christians of the past really said, and assuredly did.

[Footnote 33: The habit of assuming, for the conduct of men of sense and feeling, motives intelligible to the foolish, and probable to the base, gains upon every vulgar historian, partly in the ease of it, partly in the pride; and it is horrible to contemplate the quantity of false witness against their neighbours which commonplace writers commit, in the mere rounding and enforcing of their shallow sentences. "Jerome admits, indeed, with specious but doubtful humility, the inferiority of the unordained monk to the ordained priest," says Dean Milman in his eleventh chapter, following up his gratuitous doubt of Jerome's humility with no less gratuitous asseveration of the ambition of his opponents. "The clergy, no doubt, had the sagacity to foresee the dangerous rival as to influence and authority, which was rising up in Christian society."]

34. Jerome's life by no means "began as a monk of Palestine." Dean Milman has not explained to us how any man's could; but Jerome's childhood, at any rate, was extremely other than recluse, or precociously religious. He was born of rich parents living on their own estate, the name of his native town in North Illyria, Stridon, perhaps now softened into Strigi, near Aquileia. In Venetian climate, at all events, and in sight of Alps and sea. He had a brother and sister, a kind grandfather, and a disagreeable private tutor, and was a youth still studying grammar at Julian's death in 363.

35. A youth of eighteen, and well begun in all institutes of the classic schools; but, so far from being a monk, not yet a Christian;—nor at all disposed towards the severer offices even of Roman life! or contemplating with aversion the splendours, either worldly or sacred, which shone on him in the college days spent in its Capital city.

For the "power and majesty of Paganism were still concentrated at Rome; the deities of the ancient faith found their last refuge in the capital of the empire. To the stranger, Rome still offered the appearance of a Pagan city. It contained one hundred and fifty-two temples, and one hundred and eighty smaller chapels or shrines, still sacred to their tutelary God, and used for public worship. Christianity had neither ventured to usurp those few buildings which might be converted to her use, still less had she the power to destroy them. The religious edifices were under the protection of the praefect of the city, and the praefect was usually a Pagan; at all events he would not permit any breach of the public peace, or violation of public property. Above all still towered the Capitol, in its unassailed and awful majesty, with its fifty temples or shrines, bearing the most sacred names in the religious and civil annals of Rome, those of Jove, of Mars, of Janus, of Romulus, of Caesar, of Victory. Some years after the accession of Theodosius to the Eastern Empire, the sacrifices were still performed as national rites at the public cost,—the pontiffs made their offerings in the name of the whole human race. The Pagan orator ventures to assert that the Emperor dared not to endanger the safety of the empire by their abolition. The Emperor still bore the title and insignia of the Supreme Pontiff; the Consuls, before they entered upon their functions, ascended the Capitol; the religious processions passed along the crowded streets, and the people thronged to the festivals and theatres which still formed part of the Pagan worship."[34]

[Footnote 34: Milman, 'History of Christianity,' vol. iii. p. 162. Note the sentence in italics, for it relates the true origin of the Papacy.]

36. Here, Jerome must have heard of what by all the Christian sects was held the judgment of God, between them and their chief enemy—the death of the Emperor Julian. But I have no means of tracing, and will not conjecture, the course of his own thoughts, until the tenor of all his life was changed at his baptism. The candour which lies at the basis of his character has given us one sentence of his own, respecting that change, which is worth some volumes of ordinary confessions. "I left, not only parents and kindred, but the accustomed luxuries of delicate life." The words throw full light on what, to our less courageous temper, seems the exaggerated reading by the early converts of Christ's words to them—"He that loveth father or mother more than me, is not worthy of me." We are content to leave, for much lower interests, either father or mother, and do not see the necessity of any farther sacrifice: we should know more of ourselves and of Christianity if we oftener sustained what St. Jerome found the more searching trial. I find scattered indications of contempt among his biographers, because he could not resign one indulgence—that of scholarship; and the usual sneers at monkish ignorance and indolence are in his case transferred to the weakness of a pilgrim who carried his library in his wallet. It is a singular question (putting, as it is the modern fashion to do, the idea of Providence wholly aside), whether, but for the literary enthusiasm, which was partly a weakness, of this old man's character, the Bible would ever have become the library of Europe.

37. For that, observe, is the real meaning, in its first power, of the word Bible. Not book, merely; but 'Bibliotheca,' Treasury of Books: and it is, I repeat, a singular question, how far, if Jerome, at the very moment when Rome, his tutress, ceased from her material power, had not made her language the oracle of Hebrew prophecy, a literature of their own, and a religion unshadowed by the terrors of the Mosaic law, might have developed itself in the hearts of the Goth, the Frank, and the Saxon, under Theodoric, Clovis, and Alfred.

38. Fate had otherwise determined, and Jerome was so passive an instrument in her hands that he began the study of Hebrew as a discipline only, and without any conception of the task he was to fulfil, still less of the scope of its fulfilment. I could joyfully believe that the words of Christ, "If they hear not Moses and the Prophets, neither will they be persuaded though one rose from the dead," had haunted the spirit of the recluse, until he resolved that the voices of immortal appeal should be made audible to the Churches of all the earth. But so far as we have evidence, there was no such will or hope to exalt the quiet instincts of his natural industry; and partly as a scholar's exercise, partly as an old man's recreation, the severity of the Latin language was softened, like Venetian crystal, by the variable fire of Hebrew thought, and the "Book of Books" took the abiding form of which all the future art of the Western nations was to be an hourly expanding interpretation.

39. And in this matter you have to note that the gist of it lies, not in the translation of the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures into an easier and a common language, but in their presentation to the Church as of common authority. The earlier Gentile Christians had naturally a tendency to carry out in various oral exaggeration or corruption, the teaching of the Apostle of the Gentiles, until their freedom from the bondage of the Jewish law passed into doubt of its inspiration; and, after the fall of Jerusalem, even into horror-stricken interdiction of its observance. So that, only a few years after the remnant of exiled Jews in Pella had elected the Gentile Marcus for their Bishop, and obtained leave to return to the AElia Capitolina built by Hadrian on Mount Zion, "it became a matter of doubt and controversy whether a man who sincerely acknowledged Jesus as the Messiah, but who still continued to observe the law of Moses, could possibly hope for salvation!"[35] While, on the other hand, the most learned and the most wealthy of the Christian name, under the generally recognised title of "knowing" (Gnostic), had more insidiously effaced the authority of the Evangelists by dividing themselves, during the course of the third century, "into more than fifty numerably distinct sects, and producing a multitude of histories, in which the actions and discourses of Christ and His Apostles were adapted to their several tenets."[36]

[Footnote 35: Gibbon, chap. xv. (II. 277).]

[Footnote 36: Ibid., II. 283. His expression "the most learned and most wealthy" should be remembered in confirmation of the evermore recurring fact of Christianity, that minds modest in attainment, and lives careless of gain, are fittest for the reception of every constant,—i.e. not local or accidental,—Christian principle.]

40. It would be a task of great, and in nowise profitable difficulty to determine in what measure the consent of the general Church, and in what measure the act and authority of Jerome, contributed to fix in their ever since undisturbed harmony and majesty, the canons of Mosaic and Apostolic Scripture. All that the young reader need know is, that when Jerome died at Bethlehem, this great deed was virtually accomplished: and the series of historic and didactic books which form our present Bible, (including the Apocrypha) were established in and above the nascent thought of the noblest races of men living on the terrestrial globe, as a direct message to them from its Maker, containing whatever it was necessary for them to learn of His purposes towards them, and commanding, or advising, with divine authority and infallible wisdom, all that was best for them to do, and happiest to desire.

41. And it is only for those who have obeyed the law sincerely, to say how far the hope held out to them by the law-giver has been fulfilled. The worst "children of disobedience" are those who accept, of the Word, what they like, and refuse what they hate: nor is this perversity in them always conscious, for the greater part of the sins of the Church have been brought on it by enthusiasm which, in passionate contemplation and advocacy of parts of the Scripture easily grasped, neglected the study, and at last betrayed the balance, of the rest. What forms and methods of self-will are concerned in the wresting of the Scriptures to a man's destruction, is for the keepers of consciences to examine, not for us. The history we have to learn must be wholly cleared of such debate, and the influence of the Bible watched exclusively on the persons who receive the Word with joy, and obey it in truth.