provinces overrun by the barbarians of the north.  The seat of government had passed from Rome to Constantinople, and the throne from a pagan persecutor to a succession of Christian and orthodox princes.  The genius of the empire had been humbled in the dust, and the altars of Diana and Hercules were on the point of being transferred to Catholic saints and martyrs.  The legend relates, ’that when Decius was still persecuting the Christians, seven noble youths of Ephesus concealed themselves in a spacious cavern in the side of an adjacent mountain, where they were doomed to perish by the tyrant, who gave orders that the entrance should be firmly secured with a pile of huge stones.  They immediately fell into a deep slumber, which was miraculously prolonged, without injuring the powers of life, during a period of 187 years.  At the end of that time the slaves of Adolius, to whom the inheritance of the mountain had descended, removed the stones to supply materials for some rustic edifice:  the light of the sun darted into the cavern, and the seven sleepers were permitted to awake.  After a slumber, as they thought, of a few hours, they were pressed by the calls of hunger, and resolved that Jamhlichus, one of their number, should secretly return to the city to purchase bread for the use of his companions.  The youth could no longer recognise the once familiar aspect of his native country, and his surprise was increased by the appearance of a large cross triumphantly erected over the principal gate of Ephesus.  His singular dress and obsolete language confounded the baker, to whom he offered an ancient medal of Decius as the current coin of the empire; and Jamblichus, on the suspicion of a secret treasure, was dragged before the judge.  Their mutual enquiries produced the amazing discovery, that two centuries were almost elapsed since Jamblichus and his friends had escaped from the rage of a pagan tyrant.’

This legend was received as authentic throughout the Christian world before the end of the sixth century, and was afterwards introduced by Mahomet as a divine revelation into the Koran, and from hence was adopted and adorned by all the nations from Bengal to Africa who professed the Mahometan faith.  Some vestiges even of a similar tradition have been discovered in Scandinavia.  ’This easy and universal belief,’ observes the philosophical historian of the Decline and Fall, ’so expressive of the sense of mankind, may be ascribed to the genuine merit of the fable itself.  We imperceptibly advance from youth to age, without observing the gradual, but incessant, change of human affairs; and even, in our larger experience of history, the imagination is accustomed, by a perpetual series of causes and effects, to unite the most distant revolutions.  But if the interval between two memorable eras could be instantly annihilated; if it were possible, after a momentary slumber of two hundred years, to display the new world to the eyes of a spectator who still retained a lively and recent impression of the old, his surprise and his reflections would furnish the pleasing subject of a philosophical romance.’ [Footnote:  Gibbon, Decline and Fall. chap, xxxiii.]