tially the centre of light, the sovereign of thought, the capital of civilization, until her final downfall in the sixteenth century. The history of Rome, and the history of modern Italy, are no more related to each other, than a tragedy is to the afterpiece. Not only the nations and their languages, not only manners and morals, laws and religion, have given place to others; not only the monuments of men have been erased from the face of the land, but the land itself, its general aspect, and its very climate, are changed. The fall of the Roman empire under the invasion of the northern nations, an event so deplorable in its immediate consequences, was not merely a necessary result of the ebbing and flowing of human things; it was perhaps an event as desirable as it was inevitable. Rome and Roman Italy had ceased to live, long before any foreign nation even ventured across the Alps. It was a superannuated body, which in the last struggle against imminent death, by an animal instinct, summoned all its vital principles to the heart, only to witness the fate of its members and prepare for its own. Rome, as is related of few fortunate pirates and robbers, after escaping all the trials of a life of peril and violence, was consumed by inanition, and died of old age. Long before Alaric and Attila laid waste the rich vale of the Po, that fair country was little better than a desert. The fertile colonies of Cisalpine Gaul, reclaimed by the sober Romans from the swamps of that unruly river, were abandoned by the same Romans, intoxicated by a long career of success. The right of citizenship, extended over all Italy, crowded in a few years the capital with some millions of inhabitants at the expense of the country. Her games and spectacles, her largesses and unbounded luxury, afforded a gay and easy style of living to the lazy populace, who flocked to her from all parts. Rome became a vast and active crucible, into which mankind, in all its varieties, flowed from all the provinces, and there, by a rapid process, melted and vanished. To these physical causes of depopulation and moral debasement and corruption, celibacy, and its attendant vices, a general distaste for settled life, for domestic happiness, for all social ties and pure affections, (because all human affections form an uninterrupted chain, a single link of which cannot be broken or relaxed without the dissolution of the whole system,) add unbounded ambition, civil proscriptions, religious dissensions, an old, discredited worship, with loose and perverted morals, a new, holy, but misinterpreted creed, corrupted almost at its sources, the work of God fallen into the hands of man! In such a state of things, the invasion of the barbarians (so the Latin writers were wont to call the northern tribes) had the effect which an inundation of the Nile has upon the plains of Egypt. The land lies exhausted with its own efforts, burning and withering under the rays of the same tropical sun, which had called into action its productive energies, and languishing in a slow decay, from which no reaction seems to be able to redeem it. Then, from the bosom of unexplored mountains, gathered in the silence of untrodden regions, the flood roars from above. The pale remains of a faded vegetation are washed away; but all was dead, or doomed to impending death, long before it was buried under the conquering tides. Now let the sea sons have their own course; gardens and fields will smile again on those desolate marshes, palms and cedars again will wave their lofty crests to the skies, in all the pride of youth, as if singing the praises of the Creator, and attesting that his resources are without number, that man alone perishes, with his works, but nature is immortal. At the first setting in of the storm, the laborer, who had not yet been seduced from his cottage by corruption, was frightened away by the savage yell of the conquerors, and came for refuge to that capital which he still considered as the Eternal City. What yet remained cultivated and inhabited, was trampled under the hoofs of the horses of Alaric. The deluge raged for about two centuries.* The tract from the Alps to the Tiber, the garden of Europe, was but a vast field of carnage. It would be useless to relate the campaigns of Alaric, Attila, and Genseric, the scourges of God, to describe atrocities, provoked, now by the fatal obstinacy of a blind emperor, now by the profligacy of an ambitious woman, now by the sacrilegious revenge of a proscribed subject. They came; they enjoyed all the luxury of destruction; but they and their armies vanished among the ruins of the country, as a river lost among the sands it heaps up at its mouth. * Rome was taken by Alaric, A. D. 410. The invasion of Attila was in 451; the storming of Rome by Genseric, in 455. Till the conquest of Odoacer, no northern nation had thought of settling in Italy. They were led by a desire of military fame, or by the thirst of carnage and plunder. They came and passed with a feeling of indefinable awe, mistrusting Italy as a fatal land which might, at every step, open under their feet; and their curiosity, envy, or revenge was no sooner gratified, than they looked for a home in France, Spain, or Africa, where to gather the spoils of Italy, and settle in peace and security. The first stone of the new social edifice was laid under the auspices of Odoacer and Theodoric.* The invasion of the Heruli, and subsequently that of the Ostrogoths, did not bear the marks of the stupid ferocity of the Huns and Vandals. The advantage of a superior culture, and the influence of a purer religion, had already softened the iron hearts of the North. The reign of Theodoric stands alone in those ages of darkness, like a beautiful star in a retired spot of the skies. But his successors, involved in civil discords, and in long, mortal struggles against the Greeks, led by Belisarius and Narses, lay finally lifeless and breathless at the mercy of a new enemy, who, invited at first merely as a mediator in their contests, ended by possessing himself, without resistance, of the prize. The crowning of Alboin, king of the Lombards in Italy, about the year 568, must be considered as the epoch that divided ancient from modern Italy. After that time the Roman emperors of Constantinople continued to lose ground in Italy until their definitive expulsion. From that time all traces are lost of the old religion and language. From that time Rome, and the charm of her name, belong to the past. The Lombards and their numberless followers, after their barbaric mode of warfare, carried along with them their wives and children, all they held dear in life. They left nothing behind to regret. At their first arrival they cherished their adopted homes with that fatal fondness, with which fair Italy is but too apt to inspire her visiters. Having found no resistance, they did not indulge in wanton cruelties; having suffered no losses, they turned their strength to secure a conquest, that had so often escaped from the hands of their predecessors. They shared the lands with the conquered. They adopted the religion of Italy; Italy adopted their morals. * Odoacer, king of Italy, A. D. 476; Theodoric, 493. Laws and languages were mixed, and the two races were soldered by a peaceful contact of two hundred and six years. The scattered remains of Goths and Vandals of the preceding invasions were easily adopted as sons by the conquering tribe, by right of consanguinity; and the Latin nation, already reduced to atoms, was either dispersed or subdued. Had Alboin, at his first onset, taken possession of Rome and of the whole country; had he not been too anxious to enjoy his newly-acquired dominions, fixing his royal seat at Pavia; had he not so soon fallen a victim to a domestic tragedy, he would have aspired to the glory of the founder of Italy. What he neglected to do, when it was perhaps in his power, his successors attempted in vain, when it was too late. For two hundred and six years, their constant efforts were turned against the pontiffs of Rome and the imperial towns, which, garrisoned by the Greeks, still recognised the sway of the Eastern emperors. Some of these seaports, such as Ravenna and Ancona, could easily have been, and were actually subdued; but Rome, which already began to impose a new kind of yoke upon the nations, presented a far different obstacle to the Lombard ambition. Here they failed, and here their fortune began to waver. The Franks, who had already threatened to pass the Alps during the whole period of the Lombard dominion, now invited by the popes, after repeated attacks, put an end to the dynasty founded by Alboin. But this last convulsion had not the same effects upon the country as the preceding invasions. Charlemagne led an army with him, not a nation.* He took the Lombards by surprise and defection. They were conquered sooner than attacked. Those who could fight, would not; those who would, could not. The campaign of Charles was merely a triumphal march. Having reassured the Pope, and settled, in haste, his new kingdom, he returned to France with the whole of his host, leaving the mass of the Lombard population safe and untouched; so that, with the exception of the royal dynasty, their great work of regeneration was not sensibly disturbed or diverted. Between Alaric and Frederic Barbarossa, there was an interval of seven hundred and seventy-four years. So long a time does it require to mature the designs of Providence, as if Charlemagne's Conquest of Italy was in A. D. 774. The foun to give a lesson of patience and resignation to the restless anxiety of human nature. The northern hive of the nations was now exhausted; the Normans, Hungarians, and Saracens were the last tribes wandering for a home. dation of the great monarchies of Europe was laid. Armies and fleets might still be busy in their work of destruction, but each nation had settled within defined limits, and belonged to the soil, no less than the forests and mountains among which they had chosen their abode. To the circumstances of their original descent is to be principally ascribed the difference of features, manners, and feelings, that characterizes the inhabitants of the various districts of the Italian peninsula even in our days, as also the discordant spirit eternally reigning among them, their different progress in civilization, their different taste in letters and arts. The valley of the Po, indeed all the region from Saluzzo to Venice, and from Aquileia to Ancona, the largest and richest part of the country, is still distinguished by the vague appellation of Lombardy, and is undoubtedly inhabited by the descendants of the Goths and Lombards of Theodoric and Alboin. It has been of all countries the oftenest invaded and trodden over; but, from the time of the Lombard settlement, foreigners have passed through the land, as the Austrians do now, strangers after two centuries as much as on the day of their arrival. The Lombards are to be distinguished, among the sons of Italy, by their fair hair and complexion, large, serene eyes, tall and portly but not always elegant forms. They are of a sanguine temper, which is often turned into apathy in mature age. Living in a rich country, they are fond of the table, and their southern brethren have called them the Lombard wolves, or the Boeotians of Italy. But their lands have always been the best cultivated, their manufactures, as long as liberty protected them, the most flourishing in Europe; and, though they came rather late into such matters, they have now the lead in letters, science, and arts. The Lombards are also the stoutest hearts in the day of battle; they are true and generous, open and hospitable, but too often credulous, and indolent in all the business of life. Venice, owing, as we have seen, her origin to the barbarian invasions, is perhaps the only spot in Italy pure from barVOL. L. No. 106. 7 |