otices of his subsequent life and of the date of his death
are denied us; a striking proof of the absolute nullity of his
character.

[Footnote 48: I allude here to a letter in the Vanarum of Cassiodorus
(iii., 35), written between 504 and 525, and addressed to Romulus and
his mother. But we can by no means prove that this is Romulus
Augustulus.]

This then was the event which stands out in the history of Europe as the
"Fall of the Western Empire" The reader will perceive that it was no
great and terrible invasion of a conquering host like the Fall of the
Eastern Empire in 1453; no sudden overthrow of a national polity like
the Norman Conquest of 1066; not even a bloody overturning of the
existing order by demagogic force like the French Revolution of 1792. It
was but the continuance of a process which had been going forward more
or less manifestly for nearly a century,--the recognition of the fact
that the _foederati,_ the so-called barbarian mercenaries of Rome, were
really her masters. If we had to seek a parallel for the event of 476,
we should find it rather in the deposition of the last Mogul Emperor at
Delhi, and the public assumption by the British Queen of the "Raj" over
the greater part of India, than in any of the other events to which we
have alluded.

Reflecting on this fact, and seeing that the Roman Empire still lived on
in the East for nearly a thousand years, that the Eastern Caesar never
for many generations reliquished his claim to be considered the
legitimate ruler of the Old Rome, as well as of the New, and sometimes
asserted that claim in a very real and effective manner, and considering
too that Charles the Great, when he (in modern phrase) "restored the
Western Empire" in 800, never professed to be the successor of Romulus
Augustulus, but of Constantine VI., the then recently deposed Emperor of
the East; the latest school of historical investigators, with scarcely
an exception, minimise the importance of the event of 476, and some even
object to the expression "Fall of the Western Empire" as fitly
describing it. The protest is a sound one and was greatly needed.
Perhaps now the danger is in the other direction, and there is a risk of
our making too little of an event in which after all the sceptre did
manifestly depart from Rome. During the whole interval between
Odovacar's accession and Belisarius' occupation of Rome (476-536), no
Roman, however proud or patriotic, could blind himself to the