too writes a poem on the Moselle; and there is the same smiling countryside with terraced vineyards sloping down to the quiet stream and the smoke of villas rising from the woods.  Fortunatus too made the round of the country houses, especially of the sumptuous villas belonging to Leontius bishop of Bordeaux, a great Gallo-Roman aristocrat, whose grandfather had been a friend of Sidonius.  The hot baths, the pillared porticos, the lawns sloping to the river, are all there; the feasts are even more magnificent (they upset Fortunatus’s digestion badly) and the talk is still of literature.  The more intelligent of the barbarian lords have imitated this refined and luxurious life as best they may.  The Franks as well as the Gallo-Romans welcome little eager Fortunatus; every count wants a set of Latin verses dedicated to himself.  It is plain that some of the old country house life at least has survived.  The Apollinaris set still enjoys its hot baths and its tennis; as Dill puts it, the barbarian might rule the land, but the laws of polite society would be administered as before.

But when you look again you realize that it is not the same.  It is not merely because we know that even these remnants of the social and material civilization of Rome would soon themselves die away that the tragedy of the sixth century looms so dark.  It is because when we look below the surface we see that the life has gone out of it all, the soul that inflamed it is dead, nothing is now left but the empty shell.  These men welcome Fortunatus just because he comes from Italy, where the rot has gone less far, where there still survives some reputation for learning and for culture.  They slake their nostalgia a little in the presence of that enfant perdue of a lost civilization.

For this is the world of Gregory of Tours, of which you may read in his History of the Franks.  The rule under which it lives is the rule of the horrible Merovingian kings.  Side by side with the villas barbarism spreads and flourishes like a jungle growth.  Learning is dying—­hardly the ghost of a university is left—­and Gregory himself who came of a great Gallo-Roman family and was a bishop bewails his ignorance of grammar.  The towns are shrinking, crouched behind their defences.  The synagogues are flaming, and the first step has been taken in that tragic tale of proscription and tallage, tallage and expulsion which (it seems) must never end.  As to politics, the will of the leader and his retinue is the rule of the Franks, and purge and bloodbath mark every stage in the rivalry of the Merovingian princes.  The worst of them are devils like Chilperic and Fredegond, the best of them are still barbarians like that King Guntram, who fills so many indulgent pages in Gregory of Tours.  He is a vaguely contemporary figure, a fat, voluble man, now purring with jovial good nature, now bursting into explosions of wrath and violence, a strange mixture of bonhomie and brutality.  It is an ironic commentary on what has happened to civilization that Gregory should regard him with affection, that he should be known as ’Good King Guntram’ and that the church should actually have canonized him after his death.  Good King Guntram; Michelet has summed him up in a phrase ’Ce bon roi a qui on ne reprochait que deux ou trois meurtres.’