If this be the glory of Julius, the first great founder of the Empire, so is it also the glory of Charles, the second founder, and of more than one among his Teutonic successors.  The work of the mediaeval Empire was self-destructive; and it fostered, while seeming to oppose, the nationalities that were destined to replace it.  It tamed the barbarous races of the North and forced them within the pale of civilization.  It preserved the arts and literature of antiquity.  In times of violence and oppression, it set before its subjects the duty of rational obedience to an authority whose watchwords were peace and religion.  It kept alive, when national hatreds were most bitter, the notion of a great European Commonwealth.  And by doing all this, it was in effect abolishing the need for a centralizing and despotic power like itself; it was making men capable of using national independence aright; it was teaching them to rise to that conception of spontaneous activity, and a freedom which is above law but not against it, to which national independence itself, if it is to be a blessing at all, must be only a means.  Those who mark what has been the tendency of events since A.D. 1789, and who remember how many of the crimes and calamities of the past are still but half redressed, need not be surprised to see the so-called principle of nationalities advocated with honest devotion as the final and perfect form of political development.  But such undistinguishing advocacy is after all only the old error in a new shape.  If all other history did not bid us beware the habit of taking the problems and the conditions of our own age for those of all time, the warning which the Empire gives might alone be warning enough.  From the days of Augustus down to those of Charles V., the whole civilized world believed in its existence as a part of the eternal fitness of things, and Christian theologians were not behind heathen poets in declaring that when it perished the world would perish with it.  Yet the Empire is gone, and the world remains, and hardly notes the change.

FRANCIS TREVELYAN BUCKLAND

(1826-1880)

Certainly, among the most useful of writers are the popularizers of science; those who can describe in readable, picturesque fashion those wonders and innumerable inhabitants of the world which the Dryasdusts discover, but which are apt to escape the attention of idlers or of the busy workers in other fields.  Sometimes—­not often—­the same man unites the capacities of a patient and accurate investigator and of an accomplished narrator.  To such men the field of enjoyment is boundless, as is the opportunity to promote the enjoyment of others.