ce diffused in the palace of Milan,
express to every age the natural sentiments of the heart, in the just
and pleasing language of allegorical fiction. But the amorous impatience
which Claudian attributes to the young prince, must excite the smiles
of the court; and his beauteous spouse (if she deserved the praise of
beauty) had not much to fear or to hope from the passions of her lover.
Honorius was only in the fourteenth year of his age; Serena, the mother
of his bride, deferred, by art of persuasion, the consummation of the
royal nuptials; Maria died a virgin, after she had been ten years a
wife; and the chastity of the emperor was secured by the coldness,
perhaps, the debility, of his constitution. His subjects, who
attentively studied the character of their young sovereign, discovered
that Honorius was without passions, and consequently without talents;
and that his feeble and languid disposition was alike incapable of
discharging the duties of his rank, or of enjoying the pleasures of his
age. In his early youth he made some progress in the exercises of
riding and drawing the bow: but he soon relinquished these fatiguing
occupations, and the amusement of feeding poultry became the serious and
daily care of the monarch of the West, who resigned the reins of empire
to the firm and skilful hand of his guardian Stilicho. The experience of
history will countenance the suspicion that a prince who was born in
the purple, received a worse education than the meanest peasant of his
dominions; and that the ambitious minister suffered him to attain
the age of manhood, without attempting to excite his courage, or
to enlighten his under standing. The predecessors of Honorius were
accustomed to animate by their example, or at least by their presence,
the valor of the legions; and the dates of their laws attest the
perpetual activity of their motions through the provinces of the Roman
world. But the son of Theodosius passed the slumber of his life, a
captive in his palace, a stranger in his country, and the patient,
almost the indifferent, spectator of the ruin of the Western empire,
which was repeatedly attacked, and finally subverted, by the arms of the
Barbarians. In the eventful history of a reign of twenty-eight years, it
will seldom be necessary to mention the name of the emperor Honorius.

Chapter XXX: Revolt Of The Goths.--Part I.

Revolt Of The Goths.--They Plunder Greece.--Two Great
Invasions Of Italy B