fused and more tenable scheme
for them. The Classic zone, from the beginning to the end of its visible
authority, is composed of these two elements--Greek imagination, with
Roman order: and the divisions or dislocations of the third and fourth
century are merely the natural apparitions of their differences, when
the political system which concealed them was tested by Christianity. It
seems almost wholly lost sight of by ordinary historians, that, in the
wars of the last Romans with the Goths, the great Gothic captains were
all Christians; and that the vigorous and naive form which the dawning
faith took in their minds is a more important subject of investigation,
by far, than the inevitable wars which followed the retirement of
Diocletian, or the confused schisms and crimes of the lascivious court
of Constantine. I am compelled, however, to notice the terms in which
the last arbitrary dissolutions of the empire took place, that they may
illustrate, instead of confusing, the arrangement of the nations which I
would fasten in your memory.

21. In the middle of the fourth century you have, politically, what
Gibbon calls "the final division of the _Eastern_ and _Western
Empires_." This really means only that the Emperor Valentinian,
yielding, though not without hesitation, to the feeling now confirmed in
the legions that the Empire was too vast to be held by a single person,
takes his brother for his colleague, and divides, not, truly speaking,
their authority, but their attention, between the east and the west. To
his brother Valens he assigns the extremely vague "Praefecture of the
East, from the lower Danube to the confines of Persia," while for his
own immediate government he reserves the "warlike praefectures of
Illyricum, Italy, and Gaul, from the extremity of Greece to the
Caledonian rampart, and from the rampart of Caledonia to the foot of
Mount Atlas." That is to say, in less poetical cadence, (Gibbon had
better have put his history into hexameters at once,) Valentinian kept
under his own watch the whole of Roman Europe and Africa, and left Lydia
and Caucasus to his brother. Lydia and Caucasus never did, and never
could, form an Eastern Empire,--they were merely outside dependencies,
useful for taxation in peace, dangerous by their multitudes in war.
There never was, from the seventh century before Christ to the seventh
after Christ, but _one_ Roman Empire, which meant, the power over
humanity of such men as Cincin