ect of a mixed people, out of which the
modern Italian speech was to grow, decadent in form, degenerate in
strength but renascent in a grace and beauty which the Latin never
possessed. First the vast population of slaves brought in their
civilized and their barbarous words--Greek, Hebrew and Arabic, or
Celtic, German and Slav; then came the Goth, and filled all Italy with
himself and his rough language for a hundred years. The Latin of the
Roman Mass is the Latin of slaves in Rome between the first and fifth
centuries, from the time of the Apostles to that of Pope Gelasius, whose
prayer for peace and rest is the last known addition to the Canon,
according to most authorities. Compare it with the Latin of Livy and
Tacitus; it is not the same language, for to read the one by no means
implies an understanding of the other.

Or take the dress. It is told of Augustus, as a strange and almost
unknown thing, that he wore breeches and stockings, or leg swathings,
because he suffered continually with cold. Men went barelegged and
wrapped themselves in the huge toga which came down to their feet. In
the days of Augustulus the toga was almost forgotten; men wore leggings,
tunics and the short Greek cloak.

In the change of religion, too, all customs were transformed, private
and public, in a way impossible to realize today. The Roman household,
with the father as absolute head, lord and despot, gradually gave way to
a sort of half-patriarchal, half-religious family life, resembling the
first in principle but absolutely different from it in details and
result, and which, in a measure, has survived in Italy to the present
time.

In the lives of men, the terror of one man, as each despot lost power,
began to give way to the fear of half-defined institutions, of the
distant government in Constantinople and of the Church as a secular
power, till the time came when the title of Emperor raised a smile,
whereas the name of the Pope--of the 'Father-Bishop'--was spoken with
reverence by Christians and with respect even by unbelievers. The time
came when the army that had made Emperors and unmade them at its
pleasure became a mere band of foreign mercenaries, who fought for wages
and plunder when they could be induced to fight for Rome at all.

So the change came. But in the long five hundred years of the Western
Empire Rome had filled the world with the results of her own life and
had founded modern Europe, from the Danube to England an