Salona, in the history of the Roman world, | venna, she was for a moment ruled, if not was not yet over. The house of Constan- by her own Cæsar, at least by her own tine passed away; but another Illyrian patrician on her own soil.

house

- for Valentinian was of Pannonia The dynasty of Valentinian, as contin- stood ready to step into its place. It ued by Theodosius, the dynasty of Theowas again from the lands between the dosius as continued by the later ConstanHadriatic and the Danube that the cham- tius, had not died out before Dalmatia, as pion came who was once more to check a land, held for a time a more important the German from his palace at Trier, and place than she had ever held since the Roto carry the Roman dominion within our man conquest. Marcellian, patrician of own island further than Agricola himself the West, flits like a shadow across the had carried it. And if Valentinian him- confused history of the fifth century. He self,. in his equal dealing between Chris- appears as the ally of either empire, as the tian and pagan, between Catholic and friend of Aëtius and Marjorian, as the foe Arian, might seem a forerunner of Theod- of the vandal at Carthage, as the victim oric and Akbar, his son was to serve the of allies whom his discerning enemy new faith much where Constantine had affirmed to have, in slaying him, used their served it but a little. Gratian refused to left hand to cut off their right. But he be pontifex maximus — some said that, in concerns us as the lord of Dalmatia, who that case, Maximus might be Pontifex; in the land of Diocletian, most likely in he took away the altar of victory from the the house of Diocletian, brought back Roman senate-house, and some said that again the worship which Diocletian had in her wrath she forsook the Roman lived to see, not indeed proscribed, but eagles. The house of Valentinian was brought down from its exclusive place of merged, by female succession, in the house power. Marcellian, says one of the fragof Theodosius; but now an imperial mar-ments from which his history has to be riage brought back the crown once more patched up, was in faith a Greek. Now to an Illyrian born. The name of Pla- that the Greek, like all other subjects of cidia carries us back to Ravenna; but her the empire, knew no national name but second husband, Constantius, the suc- Roman, the name of Hellên was used only cessor of her nobler Goth, came from the in the sense in which we are familiar with same land, and had risen to honor by the it in the New Testament, to mark a votary same paths, as Claudius and Aurelian.* of the falling heathen creed. It is said But before Illyricum had thus given Rome that, before his day, the palace of Jovius, a third Constantius, more akin to the first with no Augustus to dwell within its gates, than to the second, she had already begun had already been put to meaner uses. to show her character as a border-land be- the entry in the Notitia Imperii is comtween the two great divisions of the em- monly understood,† it had become a manpire. In the partition of the provinces ufactory of female weavers; but we can between the sons of Theodosius, Illyricum hardly conceive a prince who ruled over in the wider sense was divided between Dalmatia fixing his throne anywhere else the two, and the exact extent of the bor- but in the house of Diocletian. And Dalders of each became a subject of dispute, matia was yet to give one more emperor to if not between the two puppet emperors Ravenna. When Marcellian died, his themselves, yet at least between their min-nephew Nepos still kept his hold on his isters. And the land showed its border character in another way. It was the marching-ground of Alaric, as he passed to and fro between the great cities of the elder world, in those inroads when men deemed that Athênê and Achilleus scared him from the walls of Athens,† but when neither god nor hero nor Christian saint could scare him from the walls of Rome. Before long, a glimpse of independent being was given to the Dalmatian land. In- from the fragments of Priscus, 156, 157, 218. pios, Bell, Vand., i. 6. Damascius ap. Photius, 342, stead of giving Cæsars to Rome and Ra-ed Bekker. It is from this last writer that we get the

As

Dalmatian lordship. From Dalmatia he crossed, by the authority of Zeno, to supplant Glycerius on the western throne, and to cause his deposed competitor to exchange the imperial throne of Ravenna for the episcopal chair of his own Salona. Among the ruins of that city we still trace the ground-plan of a basilica and a bap

*The story of Marcellianus or Marcillinus comes

Proko

proverbial saying, which is also applied to the death of Aëtius, and the singular description of Marcellian as Δαλματων ὴν χώρας αὐτοδέσποτος ἡγεμὼν, Ελλην τὴν δόξαν.

"Procurator Gynæcii Joviensis Dalmatiæ Aspalato," is the entry in the Notitia Occid., chap. x., p. 48.

tistery, the see of the second ex-emperor | century in truth seems to have been a time whom Salona received after a voluntary of special prosperity for the cities of the or constrained abdication. Strange indeed is the contrast between Diocletian withdrawing of his own will, and Glycerius withdrawing at the bidding of his conqueror. Stranger still is the difference between the Church trembling under the edicts of Diocletian, and the Church whose great offices had risen to such a height of wealth and secular power that a bishoprick might be used to break the fall of a deposed emperor. But the Italian reign of the last Dalmatian emperor was short and stormy. When Orestes marched against Ravenna, Nepos again sought shelter in his own land, and then died, by the intrigues, so men said, of the fallen competitor whom he had so strangely turned into his neighbor and spiritual pastor.* But this was not till the first empire of the West had passed away. Nepos, in his Dalmatian home, lived to see the patrician Odoacer dwelling in the palace of Ravenna, in name the lieutenant of the single emperor at the New Rome, in truth the first of the Teutonic lords of Italy.

Of the end of this separate Dalmatian principality of Marcellian and Nepos we have no record. But the border-land of eastern and western Europe soon again plays its part in the great strife by which Italy and Rome were won back to their allegiance to the translated Roman dominion. Dalmatia passed under the rule of Theodoric, and, when he was gone and the Gothic kingdom had lost its strength, it was the first part of his dominions to come again under the imperial power. The capture of Salona by Mundus was the first success, its loss was the first failure, of the imperial arms in the great strife between Goth and Roman.t Won back again to the empire, the city played its part as the great haven of the Hadriatic through the whole of the Gothic war. It was from Salona that Narses set forth on that last expedition which was to bring that last long struggle to its end. Taken and retaken, half ruined and restored, Salona still kept its place among the great cities of the earth, and men in after times believed that the circuit of its walls had once taken in a space equal to one half of the extent of New Rome.§ The sixth

eastern Hadriatic shore. But it was the
last bright day before the final storm fell
upon them. The revolution was at hand
which was wholly to change the face of
the world south of the Danube, and to give
those lands settlers who have formed the
main part of their inhabitants down to our
own day. In the sixth century the Slaves
began those incursions into the lands east
of the Hadriatic, which were carried far to
the south of the Dalmatian border, which
for a while caused Peloponnêsos itself to
be spoken of as a Slavonic land. While
the armies of Justinian were going forth
to win back provinces in Africa, and Spain,
and Italy, the Slavonic invaders were
traversing the eastern peninsula at their
will, and carrying the fear of their presence
to the gates of Constantinople. In the
next century the policy of Heraclius gave
them a permanent settlement in the lands
where they still dwell; ‡ and from that day
the Dalmatian cities have been what they
still are, outposts of Roman Europe, fring-
ing the coast of a Slavonic land. But with
the Slave came the more terrible Avar,
and the seventh century beheld the fall of
two of the ancient cities, the rise of two
of the modern cities, which stand foremost
in the history of the Hadriatic coast.
Jadera, Diadora, Zara-such are the vari-
ous forms of the name - - lived through
the storm. But long Salona became a
forsaken ruin, and the old Hellenic Epi-
dauros was more utterly swept away from
the face of the earth. For the homeless
refugees of Salona a shelter stood ready
hard by their own gates. They had but
to cross the gentle hill which forms the
isthmus of what we may call the Jovian
peniusula, and the house of Jovius stood
ready with its walls and gates, at once to
take the place of the fallen city.§ As Sa-
lona fell, Spalato arose; the palace gave
its name to the city, and itself became the
city, as it still remains, within the almost
untouched square of Diocletian's walls,
the largest and most thickly inhabited part
of the modern town. The peristyle of
Diocletian became the piazza of the new
city: his mausoleum became the metro
politan church of the new archbishopric

Const. Porph., De Them., ii. 6, ἐσθλαβώθη πᾶσ ἡ χώρα καὶ γέγονε βάρβαρος. Ct. De Adm. Imp. See, among other places, Prokopios, Bell. Goth. iii. 29, 38.

49, 50.

+ Const. Porph., De Adm., Imp. 29, pp. 128, 12 The imperial geographer's etymology is of the

strangest.

§ Ibid., p. 141.

And between the two buildings, a thou- | close to them. Then he asked her, in a sand years after the days of Diocletian, voice the agitation of which he could no arose the great bell-tower which first longer restrain, to what place he should strikes the eye as the voyager draws near direct the cab which he was about to call, to the bay of Spalato. Separated as it is as they could not speak together in the by so many ages from the works of the public streets. first founder, it still shows, in artistic forms which so strangely harmonize with the buildings on either side of it, how deep and lasting was the impress which the genius of that founder stamped on all later works of the building-art.

the whole truth should be told. Don't you think so?"

She spoke quietly, so dispassionately as at once to chill and exasperate him.

"To stoop to concealment would not only be a great error which would increase every evil a thousand fold," she was remonstrating strongly, yet in a manner not entirely removed from that elder sister's or mother's fashion in which she had often spoken to him in happier circumstances "it would be terribly unjust to others."

"To whom we are to serve as a warning, I suppose," he spoke with sharp irony. "Did you never think," he demanded, while a flush came over his face, "how you wrought to shame me, as you are doing this day?"

No, no," she cried, in an agony of denial.

"Yes," he affirmed, with stern indignation. 66 Did you never consider how cruelly hard, well-nigh impossible, you made it for me to tell of the marriage to the friends to whom you would not accompany me, when we had quarrelled and parted on our very wedding-day?"

"Still, if it had to be told," she said. "You may rest satisfied,” he exclaimed, with the passionate scorn of himself and her into which he had worked himself. "To-night the foolish story will be over all London - all London that knows anything of me, and nothing of you."

perhaps we had better never have met again let us part now."

"So be it," he said moodily, motioning her back to her seat. "I shall rid you of my company, if this is all that you have come up from the country to say to me, after a whole quarter of a year has passed. Can it be," he cried, a new and more heinous offence suggesting itself to his excited imagination, "that you could suspect because I kept silence, driven to it by your own conduct, that I should be false to such vows, however fruitless? Have you grossly insulted me by believing that of me? Base enough to be even criminal was that what you thought me?"

"No, so help me," she pledged herself solemnly and despairingly. "It is idle speaking, if you doubt my word," for he had made a gesture of incredulity; "but I did not believe it for an instant - I could not believe it, and I knew that, if the time ever came that you could be so miserable as to commit a great sin, it must have been your having had to do with me, your having suffered yourself to be beguiled into an acted lie, that could have tempted and driven you to the awful fall."

So far from being propitiated, the bare idea sent him nearly beside himself. "Pleasance," he said, uttering her name with fierce emphasis, "you have paid me back well for my error in imagining that He was thinking, while he spoke, of you would be, after all, pleased to find that what had been to him the unapproachable I had many advantages to lay at your feet, attractions which had won him-ay, and while I gloried, poor fool! in laying them which he was angrily conscious at this there. In return, you have conceived me moment were as powerful as ever to sub-cabable of such villanous treachery as it due him. might drive mad the most miserable wretch bearing the name of man, only to be accused of."

"The concealment is at an end," he assured her; "but whether the end has been brought about with any regard to me and my share in the misfortune whether I might not have been consulted, or even warned, as to the mode of the announcement - whether there might not have been some respect paid to my duty to my people, which would have led me to prepare them for the blow that must come unexpectedly upon them-I leave you to judge."

She listened half wistfully, half shrinkingly, to his hot taunts, and then she half rose. "Let me go," she implored him. "We are only making ourselves more miserable. Contention between us can do no good, and is horrible. I thought we might have both seen what was for our mutual good the best that can be for either of and consented to part, in a sort, friends. Since that is not to be-and

us

"Oh! don't you see that we must part?" was all that she said in answer to his violence, writhing, and wringing her hands.

"As you will," he said, in sullen resentment, giving the driver a signal to stop, and then, as he opened the door, and was about to step out, half-blinded, into the tumult of the city, he realized that he was leaving her there unprotected, and far from her country village, with its familiar scenes and faces.

He turned round with his white, contracted face, from which the pleasant youthfulness had vanished, and said stiffly, "I am bound to see after your safety. You may think little of such an obligation, but as I am a man and gentleman, it weighs upon me."

She hastened to give him what relief

she could. "I am quite safe in a respect- lets which pervaded it. able inn close to the North-eastern Rail-ter of the house it was the dearest, prettiest room in it, just like mamma herself, who was so true and kind, while yet thoroughly refined and very clever, far, far cleverer than Jane, and almost - Jane thought—than Archie. Yet Archie had taken his degree with fair credit, and had even been a prizeman one proud year, down at dear old King's, while he was considered a reading man, if only in a desultory, and not in a strictly classical fashion.