bearing down and concentrating themselves on one point - that
which is still occupied by the name, and by the waning power of
Rome. Whether he traces the progress of hostile religions, or
leads from the shores of the Baltic, or the verge of the Chinese
empire, the successive hosts of barbarians - though one wave has
hardly burst and discharged itself, before another swells up and
approaches - all is made to flow in the same direction, and the
impression which each makes upon the tottering fabric of the
Roman greatness, connects their distant movements, and measures
the relative importance assigned to them in the panoramic
history. The more peaceful and didactic episodes on the
development of the Roman law, or even on the details of
ecclesiastical history, interpose themselves as resting-places or
divisions between the periods of barbaric invasion. In short,
though distracted first by the two capitals, and afterwards by
the formal partition of the empire, the extraordinary felicity of
arrangement maintains an order and a regular progression. As our
horizon expands to reveal to us the gathering tempests which are
forming far beyond the boundaries of the civilized world - as we
follow their successive approach to the trembling frontier - the
compressed and receding line is still distinctly visible; though
gradually dismembered and the broken fragments assuming the form
of regular states and kingdoms, the real relation of those
kingdoms to the empire is maintained and defined; and even when
the Roman dominion has shrunk into little more than the province
of Thrace - when the name of Rome, confined, in Italy, to the
walls of the city - yet it is still the memory, the shade of the
Roman greatness, which extends over the wide sphere into which
the historian expands his later narrative; the whole blends into
the unity, and is manifestly essential to the double catastrophe