o to you?' Did no commissary, bargaining with a German
for cattle to be sent over the frontier by such a day of the week, and
teaching him to mistranslate into those names of Thor, Woden, Freya, and
so forth, which they now carry, the Jewish-Assyrian-Roman days of the
se'nnight, amuse the simple forester by telling him how the streets of
Rome were paved with gold, and no one had anything to do there but to eat
and bathe at the public expense, and to go to the theatre, and see 20,000
gladiators fight at once? Did no German 'Regulus,' alderman, or king,
enter Rome on an embassy, and come back with uplifted eyes and hands,
declaring that he had seen things unspeakable--a 'very fine plunder,' as
Blucher said of London; and that if it were not for the walls, they might
get it all; for not only the ladies, but the noblemen, went about in
litters of silver and gold, and wore gauze dresses, the shameless
wretches, through which you might see every limb, so that as for killing
them, there was no more fear of them than of a flock of sheep: but that
he did not see as well as he could have wished how to enter the great
city, for he was more or less the worse for liquor the whole time, with
wondrous stuff which they called wine? Or did no captive, escaped by
miracle from the butcheries of the amphitheatre, return to tell his
countrymen how all the rest had died like German men; and call on them to
rise and avenge their brothers' blood? Yes, surely the Teutons knew
well, even in the time of Tacitus, of the 'micklegard,' the great city
and all its glory. Every fresh tribe who passed along the frontier of
Gaul or of Noricum would hear more and more of it, see more and more men
who had actually been there. If the glory of the city exercised on its
own inhabitants an intoxicating influence, as of a place omnipotent,
superhuman, divine--it would exercise (exaggerated as it would be) a
still stronger influence on the barbarians outside: and what wonder if
they pressed southwards at first in the hope of taking the mighty city;
and afterwards, as her real strength became more known, of at least
seizing some of those colonial cities, which were as superhuman in their
eyes as Rome itself would have been? In the crusades, the children,
whenever they came to a great town, asked their parents if that was not
Jerusalem. And so, it may be, many a gallant young Teuton, on entering
for the first time such a city as Cologne, Lyons, or Vienna, whi