benighted land. It was a brief illumination, lasting only a century or
more, and leaving few traces; but it may account for the superior
intellectual quality which later distinguished Provence, the home of
minstrelsy.

It requires a vast extent of territory to sustain a people living by
the chase, and upon herds and flocks; hence the area which now amply
maintains forty millions of Frenchmen was all too small for six or
seven million Gauls; and they were in perpetual struggle with their
neighbors for land--more land.

"Give us land," they said to the Romans, and when land was denied them
and the gates of cities disdainfully closed upon their messengers, not
land, but vengeance, was their cry; and hordes of half-naked barbarians
trampled down the vineyards, and rushed, a tumultuous torrent, upon
Rome.

The Romans could not stand before this new and strange kind of warfare.
The Gauls streamed over the vanquished legions into the Eternal City,
silent and deserted save only by the Senate and a few who remained
intrenched in the Citadel; and there the barbarians kept them besieged
for seven months, while they made themselves at home amid
uncomprehended luxuries.

Of course Roman skill and courage at last dislodged and drove them
back. But the fact remained that the Gaul had been there--master of
Rome; that the iron-clad legions had been no match for his naked force,
and a new sensation thrilled through the length and breadth of Gaul.
It was the first throb of national life. The sixty or more fragments
drew closer together into something like Gallic unity--with a common