had had at
first spiritual, as well as physical force on its side, it would have
been soon destroyed--nay, it would have destroyed itself--by internecine
civil war. And we must believe that those Franks, Goths, Lombards, and
Burgunds, who in the early Middle Age leaped on the backs (to use Mr.
Carlyle's expression) of the Roman nations, were actually, in all senses
of the word, better men than those whom they conquered. We must believe
it from reason; for if not, how could they, numerically few, have held
for a year, much more for centuries, against millions, their dangerous
elevation? We must believe it, unless we take Tacitus's "Germania,"
which I absolutely refuse to do, for a romance. We must believe that
they were better than the Romanised nations whom they conquered, because
the writers of those nations, Augustine, Salvian, and Sidonius
Apollinaris, for example, say that they were such, and give proof
thereof. Not good men according to our higher standard--far from it;
though Sidonius's picture of Theodoric, the East Goth, in his palace of
Narbonne, is the picture of an eminently good and wise ruler. But not
good, I say, as a rule--the Franks, alas! often very bad men: but still
better, wiser, abler, than those whom they ruled. We must believe too,
that they were better, in every sense of the word, than those tribes on
their eastern frontier, whom they conquered in after centuries, unless we
discredit (which we have no reason to do) the accounts which the Roman
and Greek writers give of the horrible savagery of those tribes.

So it was in later centuries. One cannot read fairly the history of the
Middle Ages without seeing that the robber knight of Germany or of
France, who figures so much in modern novels, must have been the
exception, and not the rule: that an aristocracy which lived by the
saddle would have as little chance of perpetuating itself, as a
priesthood composed of hypocrites and profligates; that the mediaeval
Nobility has been as much slandered as the mediaeval Church; and the
exceptions taken--as more salient and exciting--for the average: that
side by side with ruffians like Gaston de Foix hundreds of honest
gentlemen were trying to do their duty to the best of their light, and
were raising, and not depressing, the masses below them--one very
important item in that duty being, the doing the whole fighting of the
country at their own expense, instead of leaving it to a standing army of
merc