clearly understanding this, and resolute against the Byzantine claim which was but in half abeyance, aimed at the creation of an independent Italy, where Goth and Latin should blend into a new race.  The hope proved vain.  Theodoric’s successors, no longer kings, but mere Gothic chieftains, strove obscurely against inevitable doom, until the generals of Juistinian trod Italy into barren servitude.  Only when the purpose of his life was shattered, when—­Theodoric long dead—­his still faithful service to the Gothic rule became an idle form, when Belisarius was compassing the royal city of Ravenna, and voice of council could no longer make itself heard amid tumult and ruin, did Cassiodorus retire from useless office, and turn his back upon the world.

He was aged about sixty.  Long before, he had written a history of the Goths (known to us only in a compendium by another hand), of which the purpose seems to have been to reconcile the Romans to the Gothic monarchy; it began by endeavouring to prove that Goths had fought against the Greeks at Troy.  Now that his public life was over, he published a collection of the state papers composed by him under the Gothic rulers from Theodoric to Vitigis:  for the most part royal rescripts addressed to foreign powers and to officials of the kingdom.  Invaluable for their light upon men and things fourteen hundred years ago, these Variae of Cassiodorus; and for their own sake, as literary productions, most characteristic, most entertaining.  Not quite easy to read, for the Latin is by no means Augustan, but after labour well spent, a delightful revelation of the man and the age.  Great is the variety of subjects dealt with or touched upon; from the diplomatic relations between Ravenna and Constantinople, or the alliances of the Amal line with barbaric royalties in Gaul and Africa, to the pensioning of an aged charioteer and the domestic troubles of a small landowner.  We form a good general idea of the condition of Italy at that time, and, on many points political and social, gather a fund of most curious detail.  The world shown to us is in some respects highly civilized, its civilization still that of Rome, whose laws, whose manners, have in great part survived the Teutonic conquest; from another point of view it is a mere world of ruin, possessed by triumphant barbarism, and sinking to intellectual darkness.  We note the decay of central power, and the growth of political anarchy; we observe the process by which Roman nobles, the Senatorial Order when a Senate lingers only in name, are becoming the turbulent lords of the Middle Ages, each a power in his own territory, levying private war, scornful of public interests.  The city of Rome has little part in this turbid history, yet her name is never mentioned without reverence, and in theory she is still the centre of the world.  Glimpses are granted us of her fallen majesty; we learn that Theodoric exerted himself to preserve her noble buildings,