Page:Outlines of European History.djvu/394

 332 Outlines of European History occupied its western part, serve to explain why the following centuries -~ known as the early Middle Ages — were a time of ignorance and disorder. The Germans, no doubt, varied, a good deal in their habits and character. The Goths differed from the Lombards, and the Franks from the Vandals ; but they were all alike in knowing nothing of the art, literature, and science which had been developed by the Greeks and adopted by the Romans. The invaders were ignorant, simple, vigorous people, with no taste for anything except fighting, eating, and drinking. Such was the disorder that their coming produced that the declining civiliza- tion of the Empire was pretty nearly submerged. The libraries, buildings, and works of art w^ere destroyed or neglected, and there was no one to see that they were restored. So the western world fell back into a condition similar to that in which it had been before the Romans conquered and civilized it. The loss was, however, temporary. The great heritage of skill and invention which had been slowly accumulated in Egypt and Greece, and which formed a part of the civilization which the Romans had adopted and spread abroad throughout their great Empire, did not wholly perish. It is true that the break-up of the Roman Empire and the centuries of turmoil which followed set everything back, but we shall see how^ the barbarian nations gradually developed into our modern European states, how universities were established in which the books of the Greeks and Romans were studied. Architects arose in time to imitate the old buildings and build a new kind of their own quite as imposing as those of the Romans, and men of science carried discoveries far beyond anything known to the wisest of the Greeks and Romans. QUESTIONS Section 51. How did the Germans first come into the Roman Empire, and for what reasons ? What is meant by the barbarian in- vasions ? Give some examples. Trace the history of the West Goths. Where did they finally establish their kingdom.? Why has the