having no regard for the treasures of the classic world, and unmoved by the lessons of its past experience.”  Rome itself, repeatedly sacked, was a heap of ruins.  No reconstruction had taken place.  Gardens and villas were as desolate as the ruined palaces, which were the abodes of owls and spiders.  The immortal creations of the chisel were used to prop up old crumbling walls.  The costly monuments of senatorial pride were broken to pieces in sport or in caprice, and those structures which had excited the admiration of ages were pulled down that their material might be used in erecting tasteless edifices.  Literature shared the general desolation.  The valued manuscripts of classical ages were mutilated, erased, or burned.  Ignorance finished the destruction which the barbarians began.  Ignorance as well as anarchy veiled Europe in darkness.  The rust of barbarism became harder and thicker.  The last hope of man had fled, and glory was succeeded by shame.  Even slavery, the curse of the Roman Empire, was continued by the barbarians; only, brute force was not made subservient to intellect, but intellect to brute force.  The descendants of ancient patrician families were in bondage to barbarians.  The age was the jubilee of monsters.  Assassination was common, and was unavenged by law.  Every man was his own avenger of crime, and his bloody weapons were his only law.

Nor were there seen among the barbaric chieftains the virtues of ancient Pagan Rome and Greece, for Christianity was nominal.  War was universal; for the barbarians, having no longer the Romans to fight, fought among themselves.  There were incessant irruptions of different tribes passing from one country to another, in search of plunder and pillage.  There was no security of life or property, and therefore no ambition for acquisition.  Men hid themselves in morasses, in forests, on the tops of inaccessible hills, and amid the recesses of valleys, for violence was the rule and not the exception.  Even feudalism was not then born, and still less chivalry.  We find no elevated sentiments.  The only refuge for the miserable was in the Church, and it was governed by men who shrank from the world.  A cry of despair went up to heaven among the descendants of the old population.  There was no commerce, no travel, no industries, no money, no peace.  The chastisement of Almighty Power seems to have been sent on the old races and the new alike.  It was a desolation greater than that predicted by Jeremy the prophet.  The very end of the world seemed to be at hand.  Never in the old seats of civilization was there such a disintegration; never such a combination of evils and miseries.  And there appeared to be no remedy:  nothing but a long night of horrors and sufferings could be predicted.  Gaul, or France, was the scene of turbulence, invasions, and anarchies; of murders, of conflagrations, and of pillage by rival chieftains, who sought to divide its territories among themselves.