Meantime there had been preparation for its renewal. While in Rome and
Constantinople, and in the districts under their immediate influence,
this Roman art of pure descent was practised in all its refinement, an
impure form of it--a patois of Romanesque--was carried by inferior
workmen into distant provinces; and still ruder imitations of this
patois were executed by the barbarous nations on the skirts of the
empire. But these barbarous nations were in the strength of their
youth; and while, in the center of Europe, a refined and purely
descended art was sinking into graceful formalism, on its confines a
barbarous and borrowed art was organizing itself into strength and
consistency. The reader must therefore consider the history of the
work of the period as broadly divided into two great heads; the one
embracing the elaborately languid succession of the Christian art of
Rome; and the other the imitations of it executed by nations in every
conceivable phase of early organization, on the edges of the empire,
or included in its now merely nominal extent.

Some of the barbaric nations were, of course, not susceptible of this
influence; and, when they burst over the Alps, appear, like the Huns,
as scourges only, or mix, as the Ostrogoths, with the enervated
Italians, and give physical strength to the mass with which they
mingle, without materially affecting its intellectual character. But
others, both south and north of the empire, had felt its influence,
back to the beach of the Indian Ocean on the one hand, and to the ice
creeks of the North Sea on the other. On the north and west the
influence was of the Latins; on the south and east, of the Greeks. Two
nations, preeminent above all the rest, represent to us the force of
derived mind on either side. As the central power is eclipsed, the
orbs of reflected light gather into their fulness; and when sensuality
and idolatry had done their work, and the religion of the empire was
laid asleep in a glittering sepulcher, the living light rose upon
both horizons, and the fierce swords of the Lombard and Arab were
shaken over its golden paralysis.

The work of the Lombard was to give hardihood and system to the
enervated body and enfeebled mind of Christendom; that of the Arab was
to punish idolatry, and to proclaim the spirituality of worship. The
Lombard covered every church which he built with the sculptured
representations of bodily exercises--hunting and war. The Arab
banish