some God-given instinct, undiscoverable now by us. Ataulf, Alaric's
kinsman, married Placidia, the Emperor's beautiful young sister, and
accepted from him some sort of commission to fight against his
enemies in Gaul. So to the south of Gaul they went, and then into
Spain, crushing before them Alans, Sueves, and Vandals, and
quarrelling among themselves. Ataulf was murdered, and all his
children; Placidia put to shame. Then she had her revenge. To me it
is not so much horrible as pitiful. They had got the Nibelungen
hoard; and with it the Nibelungen curse.

A hundred years afterwards, when the Franks pillaged the Gothic
palace of Narbonne, they found the remnants of it. Things
inestimable, indescribable; tables of solid emerald; the Missorium, a
dish 2500 lbs. weight, covered with all the gems of India. They had
been in Solomon's Temple, fancied the simple Franks--as indeed some
of them may well have been. The Arabs got the great emerald table at
last, with its three rows of great pearls. Where are they all now?
What is become, gentlemen, of the treasures of Rome? Jewels,
recollect, are all but indestructible; recollect, too, that vast
quantities were buried from time to time, and their places forgotten.
Perhaps future generations will discover many such hoards.
Meanwhile, many of those same jewels must be in actual use even now.
Many a gem which hangs now on an English lady's wrist saw Alaric sack
Rome--and saw before and since--What not? The palaces of the
Pharaohs, or of Darius; then the pomp of the Ptolemies, or of the
Seleucids--came into Europe on the neck of some vulgar drunken wife
of a Roman proconsul, to glitter for a few centuries at every
gladiator's butchery in the amphitheatre; then went away with
Placidia on a Gothic ox-waggon, to pass into an Arab seraglio at
Seville; and then, perhaps, back from Sultan to Sultan again to its