om you your hidden wealth, and to strip you of your boasted
honour; to overthrow by oppression the oppressors of the world; to deny
you the glories of a resistance, and to impose on you the shame of a
submission. It is for this that I now abstain from storming your city,
to encircle it with an immovable blockade!'

As the declaration of his great mission burst thus from the lips of the
Gothic king, the spirit of his lofty ambition seemed to diffuse itself
over his outward form. His noble stature, his fine proportions, his
commanding features, became invested with a simple, primeval grandeur.
Contrasted as he now was with the shrunken figure of the spirit-broken
stranger, he looked almost sublime.

A succession of protracted shuddering ran through the Pagan's frame,
but he neither wept nor spoke. The unavailing defence of the Temple of
Serapis, the defeated revolution at Alexandria, and the abortive
intrigue with Vetranio, were now rising on his memory, to heighten the
horror of his present and worst overthrow. Every circumstance
connected with his desperate passage through the rifted wall revived,
fearfully vivid, on his mind. He remembered all the emotions of his
first night's labour in the darkness, all the miseries of his second
night's torture under the fallen brickwork, all the woe, danger, and
despondency that accompanied his subsequent toil--persevered in under
the obstructions of a famine-weakened body and a helpless arm--until he
passed, in delusive triumph, the last of the hindrances in the
long-laboured breach. One after another these banished recollections
returned to his memory as he listened to Alaric's rebuking
words--reviving past infirmities, opening old wounds, inflicting new
lacerations. But, saving the shudderings that still shook his body, no
outward witness betrayed the inward torment that assailed him. It was
too strong for human words, too terrible for human sympathy;--he
suffered it in brute silence. Monstrous as was his plot, the moral
punishment of its attempted consummation was severe enough to be worthy
of the projected crime.

After watching the man for a few minutes more, with a glance of
pitiless disdain, Alaric summoned one of the warriors in attendance;
and, having previously commanded him to pass the word to the sentinels,
authorising the stranger's free passage through the encampment, he then
turned, and, for the last time, addressed him as follows:--

'Return to Rome, t