frontier, after long southward wanderings from the Swedish
mountains, soon to be dispossessed again by the advancing Huns, and,
crossing the Alps, to give their name for ever to the plains of
Lombardy. A few more tumultuous years, and the Franks would find
themselves lords of the Lower Rhineland; and before the hairs of
Hypatia's scholars had grown gray, the mythic Hengist and Horsa
would have landed on the shores of Kent, and an English nation have
begun its world-wide life.

But some great Providence forbade to our race, triumphant in every
other quarter, a footing beyond the Mediterranean, or even in
Constantinople, which to this day preserves in Europe the faith and
manners of Asia. The Eastern World seemed barred, by some stern
doom, from the only influence which could have regenerated it.
Every attempt of the Gothic races to establish themselves beyond the
sea, whether in the form of an organised kingdom, as the Vandals
attempted in Africa; or of a mere band of brigands, as did the Goths
in Asia Minor, under Gainas; or of a praetorian guard, as did the
Varangens of the middle age; or as religious invaders, as did the
Crusaders, ended only in the corruption and disappearance of the
colonists. That extraordinary reform in morals, which, according to
Salvian and his contemporaries, the Vandal conquerors worked in
North Africa, availed them nothing; they lost more than they gave.
Climate, bad example, and the luxury of power degraded them in one
century into a race of helpless and debauched slave-holders, doomed
to utter extermination before the semi-Gothic armies of Belisarius;
and with them vanished the last chance that the Gothic races would
exercise on the Eastern World the same stern yet wholesome
discipline under which the Western had been restored to life.