Of this sentiment, which to Cato the heathen was despair, Christianity fashioned melancholy.
At the same time was born the spirit of scrutiny and curiosity.

These great catastrophes were also great spectacles, impressive cataclysms.
It was the North hurling itself upon the South; the Roman world changing shape; the last convulsive throes of a whole universe in the death agony.

As soon as that world was dead, lo! clouds of rhetoricians, grammarians, sophists, swooped down like insects on its immense body.

People saw them swarming and heard them buzzing in that seat of putrefaction.

They vied with one another in scrutinizing, commenting, disputing.