that the new religion
and the new civilization might be established.
Christianity did its work in winning to it those
Teutonic conquerors, but how vast was the cost to the
world, occasioned by the necessity of casting into the
boiling cauldron of barbarous warfare, that noble
civilization and the treasures which Rome had gathered
in the spoil of a conquered universe! Had any old Roman,
or Christian father been gifted with Jeremiah's
prescience, he might have seen the fire blazing amidst
the forests of Germany, and the cauldron settling down
with its mouth turned towards the south, and would have
uttered his lamentation in plaintive tones, such as
Jeremiah's, and in the same melancholy key" ("Holy
Bible," with Commentary by Canon Cook, Introduction to
Jeremiah, vol. i. p. 319).

[63] Scandinavian art became strongly tinctured with
that of Byzantium. The Varangian Guards were, probably,
answerable for this, by their intercourse between Greece
and their native land, which lasted so many centuries.
There have come down to us, as witnesses of this
intercourse, many coins and much jewellery, in which all
that is Oriental in its style has been leavened by its
passage through Byzantine and Romanesque channels.
Gibbon, writing of this period, says: "The habits of
pilgrimage and piracy had approximated the countries of
the earth" (see Gibbon's "Decline and Fall," chap. lv.).

Greek embroidered patterns and Greek forms of dress
still linger in Iceland. There was lately brought to
England a bride's dress, which might have belonged to
the Greek wife of a Varangian guardsman. It is
embroidered with a border in gold of the classical
honeysuckle pattern; and the bridal wreath of gilt metal
flowers might, from its style, be supposed to have been
taken from a Greek tomb.

[64] Evidently an imitation of the peplos of Minerva
(see fig. 4, p. 32).

[65] The descent from the Persian of Arab or Moorish
art, as we generally call it when speaking of its
Spanish development, is to be accounted for by the
presence of a considerable colony of Persians in Spain
in the time of the Moors, as attested by numerous
documents still in existence. See Col. Murdoch Smith's
"Preface to Persian Art," Series of Art Handbooks of the
Kensington Museum.

[66] Ronsard, poet