destined soon to be annihilated by the conquests of Clovis and his
Franks--as false and cruel ruffians as their sainted king, the first-
born son of the Church. The history of Gaul for some centuries
becomes henceforth a tissue of internecine horrors, which you must
read for yourselves in the pages of M. Sismondi, or of Gregory of
Tours. The Allemanni (whose name has become among the Franks the
general name for Germans) held the lands from the Maine to the
Rhaetian Alps. The Burgunds, the lands to the south-west of them,
comprising the greater part of south-east Gaul. The West Goths held
the south-west of Gaul, and the greater part of Spain, having thrust
the Sueves, and with them some Alans, into Gallicia, Asturias, and
Portugal; and thrust, also, the Vandals across the straits of
Gibraltar, to found a prosperous kingdom along the northern shore of
Africa. The East Goths, meanwhile, after various wanderings to the
north of the Alps, lay in the present Austria and in the Danube
lands, resting after their great struggle with the Huns, and their
crowning victory of Netad.

To follow the fortunes of Italy, we must follow those of these East
Goths, and especially of one man among them, Theodoric, known in
German song as Dietrich of Bern or Verona.

Interesting exceedingly to us should this great hero be. No man's
history better shows the strange relations between the Teutons and
the dying Empire: but more; his life is the first instance of a
Teuton attempting to found a civilized and ordered state, upon
experience drawn from Roman sources; of the young world trying to
build itself up some sort of dwelling out of the ruins of the old.
Dietrich failed, it is true. But if the thing had been then
possible, he seems to have been the man to have done it. He lived