Alps behind him, and before him the sun and the sea, and the plains
of Po; he was a courtier as a boy in Desiderius' court at Pavia, and
then, when Charlemagne destroyed the Lombard monarchy, seems to have
been much with the great king at Aix. He certainly ended his life as
a Benedictine monk, at Monte Casino, about 799; having written a Life
of St. Gregory; Homilies long and many; the Appendix to Eutropius
(the Historia Miscella, as it is usually called) up to Justinian's
time; and above all, this history of the Lombards, his forefathers,
which I shall take as my text.

To me, and I believe to the great German antiquaries, his history
seems a model history of a nation. You watch the people and their
story rise before you out of fable into fact; out of the dreary
darkness of the unknown north, into the clear light of civilized
Roman history.

The first chapter is 'Of Germany, how it nourishes much people, and
therefore many nations go forth of it.' The reason which he gives
for the immense population is significant. The further to the north,
and the colder, the more healthy he considers the world to be, and
more fit for breeding human beings; whereas the south, being nearer
to the heat of the sun, always abounds with diseases. The fact
really is, I presume, that Italy (all the south which he knew), and
perhaps most of the once Roman empire, were during the 6th and 7th
centuries pestilential. Ruined cities, stopt watercourses,
cultivated land falling back into marsh and desert, a soil too often
saturated with human corpses--offered all the elements for
pestilence. If the once populous Campagna of Rome be now
uninhabitable from malaria, what must it have been in Paul
Warnefrid's time?