"The conqueror of Italy, Narses, opened a free passage to the irresistible torrent of barbarians. On the confines of Samnium the two brothers divided their forces. With the right wing Buccelin assumed the spoil of Campania, Lucania, and Bruttium; with the left Lothaire accepted the plunder of Apulia and Calabria. They followed the coast of the Mediterranean and the Hadriatic, as far as Rhegium and Otranto, and the extreme lands of Italy were the term of their destructive progress. The Franks, who were Christians and Catholics, contented themselves with simple pillage and occasional murder; but the churches, which their piety had spared, were stripped by the sacrilegious hands of the Alemanni, who sacrificed horses' heads to their native deities of the woods. They melted or profaned the consecrated vessels, and the ruin of shrines and altars was stained with the blood of the faithful."1

A part of this destroying host perished by diseases, and Narses defeated the remainder the following year at Casilinum.

"Seven thousand Goths, the relics of the war, defended the fortress of Campsa till the ensuing spring, and every messenger of Narses announced the reduction of the Italian cities whose names were corrupted by the ignorance or vanity of the Greeks. After the battle of Casilinum Narses entered the capital. The arms and treasures of the Goths, the Franks, and the Alemanni were displayed. His soldiers, with garlands in their hands, chanted the praises of the conqueror; and Rome, for the last time, beheld the semblance of a triumph.

The twenty years of the Gothic war had consummated the distress and depopulation of Italy. As early as the fourth campaign, under the discipline of Belisarius himself, fifty thousand labourers died of hunger in the narrow region of Picenum, and a strict interpretation of the evidence of Procopius would swell the loss of Italy above the total sum of her present inhabitants perhaps fifteen or sixteen millions."2

In this long war of twenty years, which was attended with such a frightful sacrifice of human life, there was no pitched battle during the first eighteen years. It was a war against cities, and every city in Italy was besieged, taken, retaken, razed, or, by the demolition of its fortifications, left naked to the invader: and the wretched Italian soon found that he had not yet drained his cup of bitterness to the dregs.

1 Gibbon, c. xliii.

2 Ib. vol. v., c. xliii., pp. 310, 320.

Narses had been insulted by the court of Byzantium. In order to revenge himself, he invited the Lombards to evacuate Pannonia and invade Italy. They had served under him in the Ostrogothic war with distinguished bravery and ferocity. They reduced the villages to ashes, "ravaged," Gibbon says, "the matrons and the virgins on the altars, and their retreat was watched by a strong detachment of regular forces, to prevent a repetition of like disorders.”

Alboin, at the head of these savages, invaded Italy in the year 568. "Terror," says the historian, "preceded his march; he found every where, or he left a dreary wilderness. From the Trentine hills to the gates of Ravenna and Rome, the inland regions of Italy, became, without a battle or siege, the lasting patrimony of the Lombards.”1

We may now proceed to review the effect produced on the other European provinces of the empire by the fall of the kingdom of the Ostrogoths.

"Even the Gothic victories of Belisarius," says Gibbon, “were prejudicial to the state, since they abolished the important barrier of the Upper Danube, which had been so faithfully guarded by Theodoric and his daughter. For the defence of Italy the Goths evacuated Pannonia and Noricum, which they left in a peaceful and flourishing condition; the sovereignty was claimed by the Emperor of the Romans. The actual possession was abandoned to the first invader. On the opposite banks of the Danube, the plains of Upper Hungary, and the Transylvanian hills, were possessed, since the death of Attila, by the tribes of Gepidæ, who respected the Gothic arms, and despised, not indeed the gold of the Romans, but the secret motives of their annual subsidies. The vacant fortifications of the river were instantly seized by these barbarians. Their standards were planted on the walls of Sirmium and Belgrade.”2

The Gepida were now masters of the passes of the Danube, which they sold to the Bulgarians and Sclavonians. Gibbon thus describes them:

"The wild people who dwelt or wandered in the plains of Russia, Lithuania, and Poland, might be reduced, under the two great families

1 Decline and Fall, vol. v., c. xlv., p. 423, &c.

2 Ib. c. xlii.

of the Bulgarians and the Sclavonians. According to the Greek writers, the former, who touched the Euxine and the Lake of Mæotis, derived from the Huns their name or descent, and it is needless to renew the simple and well-known picture of Tartar manners. They were bold and dexterous archers, who drank the milk and feasted on the flesh of their fleet and indefatigable horses; whose flocks and herds followed, or rather guided, the motions of their roving camps; to whose inroads no country was remote or impervious, and who were practised in flight, though incapable of fear. The Sclavonians fought on foot, almost naked, and, except an unwieldy shield, without any defensive armour. Their weapons of offence were a bow, a quiver of small poisoned arrows, and a long rope, which they dexterously threw from a distance, and entangled their enemy on a running noose. In the field the Sclavonian infantry was dangerous by their speed, agility, and hardiness. They swam, they dived, they remained under water, drawing their breath through a hollow cane; and a river or lake was often the scene of their unsuspected ambuscade. The light armed Sclavonians, from a hundred tribes, pursued with almost equal speed the footsteps of the Bulgarian horse. The payment of one piece of gold for each soldier procured a safe and easy retreat through the country of the Gepida, who commanded the passage of the Upper Danube. The same year (539), and possibly in the same month, in which Ravenna surrendered to Belisarius, was marked by an invasion of the Huns or Bulgarians, so dreadful that it almost effaced the memory of their past inroads. They spread from the suburbs of Constantinople to the Ionian Gulph, destroyed thirty-two cities or castles, erased Potidea, which Athens had built and Philip had besieged, and repassed the Danube, dragging at their horses' heels one hundred and twenty thousand of the subjects of Justinian. In a subsequent inroad they pierced the wall of the Thracian Chersonesus, extirpated the habitations and the inhabitants, boldly traversed the Hellespont, and returned to their companions laden with the spoils of Asia. Another party, which seemed a multitude in the eyes of the Romans, penetrated, without opposition, from the Straits of Thermopyla to the Isthmus of Corinth; and the last ruin of Greece has appeared an object too minute for the attention of history. Three thousand Sclavonians passed the Danube and the Hebrus, vanquished the Roman generals who dared to oppose their progress, and plundered with impunity the cities of Illyricum and Thrace, each of which had arms and numbers to overwhelm their contemptible assailIn the siege of Topirus, whose obstinate defence had enraged the Sclavonians, they massacred fifteen thousand of the males.

ants.

Ꮓ

Procopius has confidently affirmed, that in the reign of thirty-two years each annual inroad of the barbarians consumed two hundred thousand of the inhabitants of the Roman empire."1

"By the departure of the Lombards and the ruin of the Gepida (by the Lombards)," says Gibbon, "the balance of power was destroyed on the Danube; and the Avars spread their permanent dominion from the foot of the Alps to the sea coast of the Euxine. From Belgrade to the walls of Constantinople a line may be measured of six hundred miles; that line was marked with flame and with blood. The horses of the Avars were alternately bathed in the Euxine and the Adriatic; and the Roman pontiff,2 alarmed by the approach of a more savage enemy was reduced to cherish the Lombards as the protectors of Italy."3

To recapitulate: A star falls from heaven-a third part of the fountains and rivers are made bitter, so that men die. The fall of a star, it has been shown, is the fall of a great kingdom. Fountains and rivers are the cities and inhabitants of a country. Imbittering, or injuring the symbolic waters, so that men die, represents the ruin of cities and the desolation of a country. And the third is a division of the Roman empire. Corresponding with these symbols, thus interpreted by scripture and ancient usage, we have seen in the sequence of history and the chronological order of the Apocalypse, that the kingdom of the Ostrogoths fell—that Italy was thereby depopulated, and her defenced cities made ruinous heaps-that the other European provinces of the empire were devastated, her cities sacked, and the inhabitants massacred or dragged into a distant captivity by savage hordes, who knew neither fear, nor mercy, nor pity.

1 Decline and Fall, c. xlii.

2 The Roman pontiffs, who were silently rising to power, had no rest till they effected the ruin of the Ostrogoths.

3 Decline and Fall, c. xlvi, p. 475-477.

The Fourth Angel sounded-the Third Part of the Sun, and the Third Part of the Moon, and the Third Part of the Stars are smitten.

"AND the fourth angel sounded, and the third part of the sun was smitten, and the third part of the moon, and the third part of the stars; so as the third part of them was darkened, and the day shone not for the third part of it, and the night likewise."

The heavenly luminaries, the sun, the moon and the stars, represent, in the symbolical language of prophecy, kings, nobles, and magistrates, or the civil and ecclesiastical authorities of a state; and the eclipse of the sun and moon, and the falling of the stars, the convulsion of a state and destruction of a system. Thus, in the second chapter of the Acts of the Apostles, the subversion of the Jewish state, in its civil and ecclesiastical institutions, (the Jewish religion being then totally perverted,) is foretold by the sun being turned into darkness and the moon into blood. Now, as the sun and stars, when the sun is not the Lord, signify kings and nobles, or the civil power, the moon is the symbol of a corrupt religion. And we have already seen, in the exposition of the sixth seal, that the moon represented such a system; or, at least, that the sun, the moon, and the stars, signified princes, nobles, and the religious institutions of the state. Hence it would appear, that religion, in a corrupted form, is a subject of the prophecy, and that it, as well as the civil authorities of the state, are threatened and are in danger of extinction.

As in this vision, the heavens are not rolled together, and only a third of the sun, and of the moon, and of the stars is darkened, which are not moved out of their places, but remain fixed, the symbols denote partial calamities, not the total destruction of an