butcheries of the amphitheatre, return to tell his countrymen how all
the rest had died like German men; and call on them to rise and
avenge their brothers' blood? Yes, surely the Teutons knew well,
even in the time of Tacitus, of the 'micklegard,' the great city and
all its glory. Every fresh tribe who passed along the frontier of
Gaul or of Noricum would hear more and more of it, see more and more
men who had actually been there. If the glory of the city exercised
on its own inhabitants an intoxicating influence, as of a place
omnipotent, superhuman, divine--it would exercise (exaggerated as it
would be) a still stronger influence on the barbarians outside: and
what wonder if they pressed southwards at first in the hope of taking
the mighty city; and afterwards, as her real strength became more
known, of at least seizing some of those colonial cities, which were
as superhuman in their eyes as Rome itself would have been? In the
crusades, the children, whenever they came to a great town, asked
their parents if that was not Jerusalem. And so, it may be, many a
gallant young Teuton, on entering for the first time such a city as
Cologne, Lyons, or Vienna, whispered half trembling to his lord--
'Surely this must be Rome.'

Some such arguments as these might surely be brought in favour of a
greater migration than Dr. Latham is inclined to allow: but I must
leave the question for men of deeper research and wider learning,
than I possess.



LECTURE III.--THE HUMAN DELUGE