SECTION XXII. Meantime there had been preparation for its renewal. While
in Rome and Constantinople, and in the districts under their immediate
influence, this Roman art of pure descent was practised in all its
refinement, an impure form of it--a patois of Romanesque--was carried by
inferior workmen into distant provinces; and still ruder imitations of
this patois were executed by the barbarous nations on the skirts of the
empire. But these barbarous nations were in the strength of their youth;
and while, in the centre of Europe, a refined and purely descended art
was sinking into graceful formalism, on its confines a barbarous and
borrowed art was organizing itself into strength and consistency. The
reader must therefore consider the history of the work of the period as
broadly divided into two great heads: the one embracing the elaborately
languid succession of the Christian art of Rome; and the other, the
imitations of it executed by nations in every conceivable phase of early
organization, on the edges of the empire, or included in its now merely
nominal extent.

SECTION XXIII. Some of the barbaric nations were, of course, not
susceptible of this influence; and when they burst over the Alps,
appear, like the Huns, as scourges only, or mix, as the Ostrogoths, with
the enervated Italians, and give physical strength to the mass with
which they mingle, without materially affecting its intellectual
character. But others, both south and north of the empire, had felt its
influence, back to the beach of the Indian Ocean on the one hand, and to
the ice creeks of the North Sea on the other. On the north and west the
influence was of the Latins; on the south and east, of the Greeks. Two
nations, pre-eminent above all the rest, represent to us the force of
derived mind on either side. As the central power is eclipsed, the orbs
of reflected light gather into their fulness; and when sensuality and
idolatry had done their work, and the religion of the empire was laid