threw large ships up onto the roofs of houses two miles inland, and killed in Alexandria alone fifty thousand people.—­“Aha!” said the Pagans, “we told you so.”—­“Nothing of the kind!” said the Christians in reply; “did not we set a saint on the beach at Epidaurus, before whom the oncoming billow stopped, bowed its head, and retired?” Well; no doubt that was so; but Alexandria was a perfect hotbed of saints, one of whom, you might think, might have been lured down to the beach and the perilous proximity of water for the occasion.  But let it pass!

Ten years later the Law began to marshal its armies seriously for the destruction of an obsolete world.  The Huns crossed the Volga, and fell upon the Ostrogoths, who had had a Middle-European empire up through Austria and Germany.  The Ostrogoths, somewhat flattened out, joined with the Huns to fall upon the Visigoths; who theeupon poured down through the Balkans to fall upon the Romans; and defeated and killed the emperor Valens at Adianople in 378.  Theodosius, from 379 to 395, held precariously together a frontier cracking and bulging all along the line as it had never cracked and bulged before.  When he died, the empire finally split:  of his two sons, Arcadius taking the East, Honorius the West.

In Honorius’ half, from now on it is a record of ruin hurrying on the footsteps of ruin.  Ended the quiet otium cum dignitate of the great country gentlemen; the sterile culture, the somewhat puritan morality, the placid refined life we read of in Ausonius.  You shall see now the well-ordered estate laid waste;—­the peasants killed or hiding in the woods;—­the mansion smashed, and its elegant furniture;—­the squire, the kindly-severe religious matron his mother the young wife,—­gracious lady of the house,—­ and the bonny children:—­they are hacked corpses lying at random in the wrecked salons, or in the trampled garden where my lady’s flowers now grow wild.  The land went out of cultivation; the populace, what remained of it, crowded into the walled cities, there to frowse in mental and physical stuffiness until the Middle Ages were passed,—­or else took to the wilds under any vigorous mind, and became bandits.  The open country was all trodden down by wave after wave of marauding, murdering, beer-swilling, turbulent giants from the north,—­or by the still more dreaded dwarfish horsemen whose forefathers Pan Chow had driven long since out of Asia.  They poured down into Greece; they, poured down through Gaul and Spain into Africa; into Italy; host after host of them;—­civilization was a pathetic sand-castle washed over and over by ruining seas.  Rome, indeed, could still command generals at times:  Stilicho, Aetius, and afterwards Belisarius and Narses; but they were all pitiful Partingtons swishing their mops round against a most ugly Atlantic.  In 410 Rome itself was sacked by Alaric; in the same year Britain, and then Brittany, rose and threw off the Roman yoke.  In the four-fifties came the keen