The Fall of Imperial Rome.

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make so much of an obscure royal marriage, and are wholly silent about matters of the greatest importance, e.g. about the introduction of standing armies; and certainly Christianity came in silently as far as the Roman historians are concerned. There was nothing grand to tell: "Non eloquimur magna sed vivimus," was truly said by an apologist (Minucius Felix) of what began to be contemptuously called a tertium genus (a set of nondescripts), when it could no longer be confounded with the Jewish sects.

Of other writers on the subject Mr. Wilberforce much prefers Gibbon to Merivale. Gibbon's book (he says) may almost be called ecclesiastical; it never ignores Christianity, "for the writer's hatred made him feel Christianity as some people feel a cat in the room." Merivale he accuses of keeping Christianity out of sight-of "reserving his religion for Sundays." Of Dr. Farrar's book he takes no notice, though there are passages in it as eloquent as any which he quotes from Champigny. The Count labours to set forth the wonderful completeness of Roman civilisation, and the harmonious dovetailing together of all the parts of which it was composed, and then to show how it all fell as by the touch of enchantment. His pictures of how the Romans lived are no doubt too highly coloured, but they have not the lubricity which mars a good deal of Renan's last work (St. Paul-e g. the Dirce passages and others referring to Nero's persecution). For him, of course, Antichrist (who for Renan is Nero) is imperial Rome; and we are to suppose that Rome fell to secure the independence of the Papacy-to pave the way for the establishment of the temporal power. The fearful persecutions carried on by some, and the persistent hostility shown by all the emperors up to Constantine, are indeed brought in to account for the visitation which befell the imperial city; but as that visitation came long after the empire had become Christian, these can only be meant as additional reasons; for those who read history through Mr. Wilberforce's glass, the reason which we have assigned above must seem quite adequate to overthrow the world's empire. It certainly was a complete overthrow. "For many weeks," says Mr. Wilberforce, "the very ruins of Rome were deserted. He who now visits her, instead of singing with the godless poet: alas, the lofty city! and alas, the trebly hundred triumphs! should rather recall those words in the Apocalypse: Rejoice over her, O heaven,

for in Rome, when she fell, the crimes as well as the civilisation of a thousand years were accumulated." But then for nearly 600 of these thousand years Christianity had been at work in Rome, and for nearly half that time it had been the established religion under those Popes from whom Pius IX. traces his descent. It seems rather hard, therefore, to say that "the empire was removed not to give place to desolation, but to the throne on which Christ should visibly sit in the person of His Vicar." The Vicar was there before; all that removal of the empire did for him was to lead to his establishment as a temporal prince.

The fact is that considerable exaggeration prevails both as to the morals of imperial Rome and as to the effects of Christianity in breaking up the empire. On the first point it is certain that the debauchery of the capital produced no more effect on the empire at large than the orgies of the Second Empire did on the peasants of Brittany or Lorraine; nor must we trust the picture drawn by Juvenal and Apuleius any more than we should accept Paul Féval as a correct delineator of French society. As to the second point, Christianity was one of many solvents; some few Christians were at times not unfairly accused of bad citizenship; moreover, by smoothing away the differences between Roman and barbarian, they made the final conquest easier; it seemed far less terrible that Rome should succumb to a Christian Goth than to a heathen Hun, and this feeling no doubt blunted the edge of resistance. But Rome fell, not only because the empire was opposed to Christianity, but also because it was the most wasteful system of government that ever existed. It is useless to boast (as Mr. Allies does) of the smallness of the Roman armies, while her centralisation sucked the life out of all her provinces, and gradually reduced them to the state to which the almost total destruction of the small farmers had reduced Italy. Latifundia, resulting from the vastitatem Italiæ brought about by the Punic and other wars, ruined the empire; and when it fell, Christianity was there, by God's providence, to give life to what succeeded it. Thoughtful men felt what was coming, though they did not see how to apply a remedy, and the feeling accounts for the gloomy view which every writer, from Cicero to Tacitus, takes of the world's progres. The Roman world was neither so morally bad nor so politically as Mr. Wilberforce and his friends would have us believe. They are brilliant advo

cates, and what we want is calm statements of facts. It is a fact that when Gaul was left to itself, A.D. 68, the chiefs of the nation met at Trèves, and agreed to remain under the Roman rule; but this does not prove the perfection of that rule, it rather proves the faith of the Gauls in the vitality of that empire which had several times taught them that it had a long arm and a heavy hand. M. de Champigny's contrast between Cicero and St. Augustine (he chooses them because each has told us so much of his own character) is clear, but it is certainly unfair.

Of course there is a good deal which we eschew as matter of course: "The Protestant falling away, whereby the supernatural is displaced, is just now restoring the characteristics of heathenism," is a passage of this kind. So is the following: "The salt by which Christianity acts on the world is martyrdom and holy virginity, which last (says Chrysostom) the Jews hate, but the Greeks marvel at." There are, too, occasional specimens of what we may call Roman reasoning; e.g. Cardinal Wiseman had been speaking of the Virgin Mary's robe at Chartres and of St. Ursula and her 1,100 virgins, and some reviewer, naturally enough, understands him to undertake to prove that the robe is really her robe, and that the virgins had a substantial existence, and have left their bones in Cologne for the edification of the faithful. "No such thing," says Mr. Wilberforce; "his Eminence never meant to prove this as one would prove a prisoner guilty of murder. He only undertook to show that the common objections against the relics are of no force. He and the reviewer are like knights who looked at opposite sides of the gold and silver shields in the way in which they approach the traditions of a thousand years."

But, on the whole, there is far less of this kind of writing than we might expect. There are even concessions-as where we are told (p. 40) that "in France and elsewhere certain degraded castes, despite the absorbing power of the Church, left proscribed remnants till the time of the Revolution;" we fear the poor cagots were indeed proscribed, though, if they were the descendants of Albigeois, we certainly demur to their having been originally inferior to those who degraded them. There are many shrewd observations. It is quite true, for instance, that there is far less liberty of locomotion and of many other kinds of action to a modern European, trammelled

with passports, &c., than to a citizen of the Roman Empire. It is also true that the Roman system was based on slavery, and that one great glory of Christianity is that its spirit is everywhere the death of slavery. We cannot, however, convert the proposition and assert (as Mr. Wilberforce does) that no land is free from slavery which has never been Christian, for we cannot believe that the spread of Nestorianism into China, and the fact that the insignificant sect of St. Thomas's Christians was discovered in India, had anything to do with the non-existence of slavery in those countries.

Another shrewd remark is, that Christianity is in one sense anti-national; it tends to draw nations together, while patriotism often sunders them. Our national idol, we are told, is the will of the nation (as that of our neighbours is the glory of France); and it is the stubbornness of this national will which has so long kept us as a nation out of "the one fold."

Now and then, by the way, our author is haunted by a suspicion that things in the Middle Ages were not altogether so well as they ought to have been under the almost undisputed sway of the one true Church. For instance, he thus explains the backwardness of Christian countries in the arts of peace:-"We must consider that their public men had almost every year to head armies and engage in wars, while those in heathen lands were sometimes free from this necessity. What (he adds) could be expected from our legislators now-a-days if Mr. Gladstone and Sir Roundell Palmer had to take the field almost yearly, as mediæval statesmen had ?" What a confession! We "modern heathens" have at least got rid of this necessity.

But we have said enough about a book which is chiefly remarkable because Mr. Wilberforce wrote it. His brother, the bishop, was certainly rather a man of action than of literary power. What capacity for action our author might have had his perversion prevented him from displaying. His death last year was little noticed, for he had passed out of sight more completely than might have been expected. We could wish that Dr. Newman had told, or had allowed him to tell, something about the mental process which led him over to Rome. As it is, we can only say again, that the perversion of such men is a mystery.

Homer's Iliad in Translation.

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ART. V.-1. Iliad of Homer in English Blank Verse. By EDWARD EARL OF DERBY. London: Revised Edition. Murray. 1865.

2. The Iliad of Homer in the Spenserian Stanza. By Rev. T. S. WORSLEY, and Professor CONINGTON. London: Blackwood. 1866.

3. The Iliad in English Verse. By E. DART. Longmans. 1866.

4. The Iliad of Homer in English Accentuated Hexameter. By Sir JOHN HERSCHEL, Bart. London: Macmillan. 1866.

5. The Iliad of Homer Translated into English Blank Verse. By WILLIAM CULLEN Bryant. Boston: Osgood. 1870. 6. Ilias Traduite en Vers Français. Par P. Q. THOMSON. Paris. 1870.

7. The Iliad of. Homer Translated into English Blank Verse. By I. G. CORDERY. London: Rivingtons. 1871.

8. Omero, dalla Rapsodia IX. dell'Iliade: La Reposta de Achille. Nella Versione inedita di AGO HINTO. Livorno.

1872.

9. Homer, Translation from the Iliad. By Right Hon. W.E. GLADSTONE. London: Strahan. 1865-1873. 10. Iliade Traduite en Français. Par le Prince LEBRUN. Limoges. 1874.

To Greece alone was it given that her first poet should be her greatest, if not the greatest of all poets. From the brain of Homer Greek poetry leaped into life at one bound, full-featured, perfect in form, and mature in strength, even as Athênê is fabled to have leaped from the teeming brain of Jupiter into the fulness and perfection of being. The poetry of other nations was born after many throes and many abortions, and their noontide splendours were the slow and struggling growth of dim and repeated dawnings. But the sun of Homer, as it has had no setting, so it has had no dawning. It burst upon the world in the full blaze