y (says Paul) slaves either of the
Lombards or the Huns (by whom he rather means Avars); and Alboin becomes
the hero of his time, praised even to Paul's days in sagas, Saxon and
Bavarian as well as Lombard, for his liberality and his glory. We shall
see now how he has his chance at the Nibelungen hoard.

He has heard enough (as all Teutons have) of Italy, its beauty, and its
weakness. He has sent five thousand chosen warriors to Narses, to help
him against Totila and the Ostrogoths; and they have told him of the fair
land and large, with its vineyards, olive-groves, and orchards, waste by
war and pestilence, and crying out for human beings to come and till it
once more.

There is no force left in Italy now, which can oppose him. Hardly any
left in the Roman world. The plague is come; to add its horrors to all
the other horrors of the time--the true old plague, as far as I can
ascertain; bred, men say, from the Serbonian bog; the plague which
visited Athens in the time of Socrates, and England in the seventeenth
century: and after the plague a famine; woe on woe, through all the dark
days of Justinian the demon-emperor. The Ostrogoths, as you know, were
extinct as a nation. The two deluges of Franks and Allmen, which, under
the two brothers Buccelin and Lothaire, all on foot (for the French, as
now, were no horsemen), had rolled into Italy during the Gothic war, had
been swallowed up, as all things were, in the fatal gulf of Italy.
Lothaire and his army, returning laden with plunder, had rotted away like
sheep by Lake Benacus (Garda now) of drink, and of the plague. Buccelin,
entrenched among his plunder-waggons by the Volturno stream in the far
south, had waited in vain for that dead brother and his dead host, till
Narses came on him, with his army of trained Herules and Goths; the
Francisc axe and barbed pike had proved useless before the arrows and the
cavalry of the Romans; and no more than five Allmen, says one, remained
of all that mighty host. Awful to think of: 75,000 men, they say, in one
column, 100,000 in the other: and like water they flowed over the land;
and like water they sank into the ground, and left no trace.

And now Narses, established as exarch of Ravenna, a sort of satrap, like
those of the Persian Emperors, and representing the Emperor of
Constantinople, was rewarded for all his conquests and labours by
disgrace. Eunuch-like, he loved money, they said; and eunuch-like, he
was harsh and