pleasures, its virtues hard and unlovely, and its vices brutal. Something is wanted to oppose the ceaseless arithmetic of the counting-room, the heartless politics of temporary expediency, the austere theology of dialectic Bodies of Divinity. As a sordid materialism would sell for gold, not only truth, justice, and humanity, but the very Muses themselves, so a coarse sensualism would lynch them as disturbers of the peace of church and state and the profits of the market, with their pestilent music and dancing. Hence it is wise to rejoice that flower-gardens shine like rivers of blossoms among the granite hills; that shop-windows are the people's galleries of art; that picture-shows are common as cattle-shows; and that the architect and painter join the carpenter and upholsterer in building and furnishing our houses. The enrichment which literature gains from poets and novelists, from the inspiration of the genius that creates the world of fiction, and so constantly enlarges to our consciousness the horizon of the world of reality, is to be welcomed as a benediction, even as we hail the daily rising of the sun, flushing with ethereal, all-baptizing iridescence the ruggedest regions of the earth.

-

ART. III. ROME IN THE MIDDLE AGE.

Geschichte der Staat Rom im Mittelalter. Vom fünften Jahrhundert bis zum sechzehnten Jahrhundert. Von FERDINAND GREGOROVIUS. Stuttgart J. G. Cotta'scher Verlag. [Three Volumes. 1859-60.]

THE centre of the widest material civilization in the ancient, and of the vastest hierarchy of the modern world, Rome has in all ages and in all the earth commanded the respect of the thoughtful and received the homage of the superstitious. The myths of its origin and the mysteries of its power have alike fascinated the poet and baffled the philosopher; but there is in its resurrection from an earthly to a spiritual kingdom something always to challenge and task the genius of the historian;

for it symbolizes forever the change of the old civilization into the new.

Seven years before the first irruption of the Northern hordes, the last of the Roman poets, Claudian, ascended the Palatine Hill with the Emperor Honorius, to gaze upon the colossal city, still glittering with its countless tokens of victory over an enslaved and motionless world, and to commemorate the splendor of its temples and arches and pillars of triumph, — of its statues and palaces and baths and amphitheatres, — all the works and all the enchantments which the Roman pride had wrought with the Roman wealth. Hardly two hundred years had elapsed when, in the pulpit of St. Peter's, Pope Gregory compared the city of Rome to a broken earthen vessel, and the Roman people, who had once ruled the world, to an eagle unplumed and weak with the years, dying there on the banks of the Tiber. Again, when eight hundred years had circled round them, Poggio Bracciolini wandered sadly among the ruins of the Capitol, to survey and describe the last relics of mediæval Rome, to be followed in three hundred years by Edward Gibbon, who found on the same spot and among the same ruins the impulse to that great work which was to add another to many proofs that the modern writers may rival and surpass the ancient. These periods all mark, if roughly, great changes in the fortunes and aspect of the city of Rome, carrying us with vast strides from its ancient glory to its modern decay; and it is of this phase of its history of which Gregorovius proposes to write, and which he has already described, in three volumes, down to the eleventh century.

Each volume contains two books, and each book is ambitious to construct and exhaust an epoch. The first book treats of the history of the city of Rome from the beginning of the fifth century to the destruction of the Western Empire in 476; the second covers the period from the appearance of Odoacer to the erection of the Exarchate of Ravenna in 586. In the second volume, the third book carries the history to the beginning of the eighth century, while the fourth discusses the interval between the pontificate of Gregory II. in 715 and the coronation of Charlemagne in 800. In the third volume, the fifth book continues the history of the city in the time of the

cance.

Carlovingians down to the year 900, and the sixth embraces and illustrates its wretched existence during the tenth century. Gregorovius has attempted a task which others have shunned, and his success has not been striking. His work is readable, and of a certain service for easy reference; but there is an intrinsic difficulty in the subject which he has not the power to overcome. The history of Rome during those thousand years which his work is meant to cover, is to a great extent the history of the world; it is the history of the most remarkable change in religion known to us among men; it is the history of the forming-time of a civilization of greater hope, because of infinite possibilities, than any which preceded it; it is the history of human culture at a trying epoch, in that dark passing through corruption and barbarism to the purer ideal and the calmer life. Thus, to one contemplating those great events of which in all this period Rome was the centre and the source, its local history has no charm and little signifiYet the history has an interest in itself, a fascination even, as revealing the character and explaining the progress of the early Christian life, to which no justice is done by making it subordinate to other details and a vaster narrative. Gregorovius has neither a new theory to startle, nor a brilliant style to charm us; his work will not make an epoch, but neither will it be without a use. It is a complete picture. he will paint of the city and the people, gradually changing from Pagans and Paganism through the purification of the Christian ideal and the growth of the Christian culture. by his very inability to confine himself to Rome, he confesses the difficulty he cannot overcome. The growth of the Church and of its political and ecclesiastical power, that graceful draping of its humble beginnings in the folds of a luxuriant tissue of legends, which, like the fables of ancient Rome, concealed and adorned the origin of its first kings and the barbarism of its early inhabitants; the civilizing influences which travelled out along the old Roman roads, not to conquer, but to heal; these things, not less than the decay of the ancient and the growth of the modern city upon its site, "in itself the most perfect expression of an organic change of culture," by which it became a second time head of the civilized world, and

But

still has a right to be called Eternal, have tempted the ambition, while we must own that they have lent a charm to the story, of Gregorovius.

The true limits of the Middle Age, gradually blending on the one hand with the ancient and on the other with the modern civilization, have been as little regarded as its real character and its indispensable function. The Middle Age of Rome extends, with Gregorovius, from its fall under the West Goths, in 410, to its last plundering in the time of Clement VII., in 1527; but that is an arbitrary division, to suit the convenience of an historian ambitious to exalt or exhaust his subject. Yet, however defined, the Middle Age presents a problem which Gregorovius has contributed little to solve. The decline of the Roman civilization and the fall of Rome were a result and an event to startle the foolish and bewilder the wise; but they had an explanation, which is to be sought not less in the effect of the Roman institutions upon the Roman people than in that gradual contact between the Roman colonists and the uncivilized races beyond the Rhine and the Danube, which, at first very far from being military, only became such when the arts of peace had taught them the advantages to be derived from the arts of war. It was the birth of the new civilization which caused the death of the old; the one illustrates and explains the other, and both together- never to be separated - make up a chapter unparalleled in interest, in spite of its rudeness and its sadness, in the history of men.

Both in ancient and modern times Rome has assumed and maintained a commanding influence; not, like Babylon, or Tyre, or Persepolis, or Memphis, or Carthage, as the creation and centre of an isolated and wayward civilization, but as the chosen agent of the power which was to subdue and the faith which was to redeem the world. All the quivering arteries of human thought and passion centre in the great heart of Rome. But there was an essential difference in the method of the development of the ancient and modern civilization in Europe. What the Greeks had the wit to invent, the Romans had the power to diffuse. But the groundwork of the modern civilization is neither Greek nor Roman, - it is Christian. It does not exalt a single race at the expense of many; but, trampling

under foot at once and forever that ideal and that system of slavery by which the ancient civilizations, Egyptian, Greek, or Roman, were developed and overwhelmed, it has brought out into bold relief the theory and the sacredness of the individual race and the individual man; so that that phantom of unity which the Romans chased with such steady courage and such fatal zeal is at last embodying itself in the very diversity of those modern races now free to develop their own powers, and emulous each of the other's culture only so far as it may perfect its own whose ancestors once marched captive and drooping behind the chariot-wheels of Roman conquerors.

But the slow withering of this stupendous colossus of the Roman empire, which, with one foot on the Euphrates and the other on the Thames, bestrode the civilized and the barbarous world, is as difficult to follow as to conceive. We can only mark it by lapses of centuries, and master it by fragments. And so with the architectural greatness of the city itself, which culminated under Trajan, and began its at first imperceptible decline under Constantine, when the new religion had by law supplanted the old, and a new capital was called up on the shores of the Bosphorus, to rival and eclipse the old capital on the banks of the Tiber. The monumental history of Rome is fitly closed by the Arch of Constantine, which Gregorovius felicitously calls a landmark between two epochs of culture; for when the Senate ordered its restoration the artists had no resource but to tear the decorations from a triumphal arch of Trajan, and, when these proved insufficient, to confess with shame that the ancient ideals were lost beyond recovery. But it was not till the beginning of the fifth century, when the edict of Honorius, which deprived the priests of their incomes, declared the temples themselves the property and the care of the state, that Paganism at last fell away like a worn-out garment from the shoulders of ancient Rome, and it became by degrees the ecclesiastical, while it remained the intellectual centre of the world.

The office of Rome in the Middle Age, indeed, was one of vast importance and peculiar honor. It was the central light to attract the devotion and preserve the faith of men. And while the philosophic observer cannot but remark that there