Page:National Life and Character.djvu/102

 Lucian, and a succession of great fathers, with Appian, Arrian, and Dio Cassius among historians; and Roman poetry may be said to have died out worthily in Claudian. The six centuries that succeeded the invasion of Attila are almost absolutely barren of thought and style. The races that produced Charlemagne and Alfred, Eginhardt and Bede, and to which we owe the Nibelungen Lied, and a host of minor poems, were certainly not wanting in original power, or even in literary capacity. Only criticism, and the appreciation of the best models, and the instinctive apprehension of perfect form had died out; and though the fraternity of great thinkers began again with Anselm, it was not till the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries that the new world seemed able to create poets of the first order, or historians like Joinville and Froissart, whom the charm of expression has endeared to all time.

Now the disastrous gap made in civilisation by the destruction of the Roman Empire has many parallels in history on a smaller scale. There can be little doubt that the wars of Alexander's successors, and the Roman conquests in Greece and Asia, destroyed a very high form of Greek literature, and that Roman supremacy arrested the spread of Greek influence in the East. In Germany, the terrible Thirty Years' War threw back the country in the estimation of good judges for two centuries at least, though in this case the eclipse of