was bounded on the north and east by the
Rhine, the Danube, the Black Sea and its southern territory, and
Syria; by all the known country from the Red Sea to the Atlantic Ocean
in northern Africa on the south; and by the Atlantic Ocean as far
north as the river Elbe on the west. Five hundred years later, about
500 A. D., the Barbarians, as they were called, had thrust aside the
Roman Empire. The Saxons controlled the southern and eastern coasts of
England; the Franks were rulers in the whole country from the Loire to
the Elbe; south of them the Visigoths ruled Spain; Italy and all the
country to the north and east of the Adriatic, as far as the Danube,
were in the hands of the Ostrogoths. The Roman Empire had been pushed
to the eastern end of the Mediterranean, with its capital at
Constantinople.

In another three hundred years, or in 800 A. D., the king of one of
these German tribes revived the title of Roman Emperor, was crowned by
the Pope, Leo III, and governed Europe as Charlemagne. His banner with
the double-headed eagle, representing the two empires of Germany and
Rome, is the standard of Germany to-day. Charles Martel, who led the
West against the East, defeating the Arabs in the country between what
is now Tours and Poitiers, was Charlemagne's grandfather. What is now
western Europe, became the home and the consolidated kingdom of the
German tribes who had drifted down from the west of the Baltic, and
into the Saxon plain. They had become masters in this territory: after
victories over the Mongolian tribes, and the Huns under Attila, who
had conquered and plundered as far as Strasburg, Worms, and Treves,
and were finally defeated near what is now Chalons; after driving off
the Arabs under Charles the Hammer (732); after imposing their rule
upon the Roman Empire, the remains of which cowered in Constantinople,
where the Ottoman Turk took even that from it in 1453, which date may
well be taken as marking the beginning of modern history, and became
themselves thereafter one of the first powers in Christian Europe; a
power which is now, in 1912, the quarrel ground of the Western powers.

These are Brobdingnagian strides through history, to reach the days of
Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Froissart, and the first
translation of the Bible into a vulgar tongue by Wickliffe, to the
days when Lorenzo de Medici breathed Greece into Europe, and the
feeling for beauty changed from invalidism to convalescence; to the