piers of black lava stemming the blue stream; while up and down the
dwindled city, the colossal fragments of Roman work--the Black Gate,
the Heidenthurm, the baths, the Basilica or Hall of Justice, now a
Lutheran church--stand out half ruined, like the fossil bones of
giants amid the works of weaker, though of happier times; while the
amphitheatre was till late years planted thick with vines, fattening
in soil drenched with the blood of thousands. Treves had been the
haunt of emperor after emperor, men wise and strong, cruel and
terrible;--of Constantius, Constantine the Great, Julian,
Valentinian, Valens; and lastly, when Potitianus's friends found
those poor monks in the garden {27} of Gratian, the gentle hunter
who thought day and night on sport, till his arrows were said to be
instinct with life, was holding his military court within the walls
of Treves, or at that hunting palace on the northern downs, where
still on the bath-floors lie the mosaics of hare and deer, and boar
and hound, on which the feet of Emperors trod full fifteen hundred
years ago.

Still glorious outwardly, like the Roman empire itself, was that
great city of Treves; but inwardly it was full of rottenness and
weakness. The Roman empire had been, in spite of all its crimes,
for four hundred years the salt of the earth: but now the salt had
lost its savour; and in one generation more it would be trodden
under foot and cast upon the dunghill, and another empire would take
its place,--the empire, not of brute strength and self-indulgence,
but of sympathy and self-denial,--an empire, not of Caesars, but of
hermits. Already was Gratian the friend and pupil of St. Ambrose of
Milan; already, too, was he persecuting, though not to the death,
heretics and heathens. Nay, some fifty years before (if the legend
can be in the least trusted) had St. Helena, the mother of