eat struggle with the Huns, and their crowning victory of Netad.

To follow the fortunes of Italy, we must follow those of these East
Goths, and especially of one man among them, Theodoric, known in German
song as Dietrich of Bern or Verona.

Interesting exceedingly to us should this great hero be. No man's
history better shows the strange relations between the Teutons and the
dying Empire: but more; his life is the first instance of a Teuton
attempting to found a civilized and ordered state, upon experience drawn
from Roman sources; of the young world trying to build itself up some
sort of dwelling out of the ruins of the old. Dietrich failed, it is
true. But if the thing had been then possible, he seems to have been the
man to have done it. He lived and laboured like what he was--a royal
Amal, a true son of Woden. Unable to write, he founded a great kingdom
by native virtue and common sense. Called a barbarian, he restored
prosperity to ruined Italy, and gave to it (and with it to the greater
part of the western world), peace for three and thirty years. Brought up
among hostile sects, he laid down that golden law of religious liberty
which the nineteenth century has not yet courage and humanity enough to
accept. But if his life was heroic, his death was tragic. He failed
after all in his vast endeavours, from causes hidden from him, but
visible, and most instructive, to us; and after having toiled impartially
for the good of conquerors and of conquered alike, he died sadly, leaving
behind him a people who, most of them, believed gladly the news that a
holy hermit had seen his soul hurled down the crater of Stromboli, as a
just punishment for the inexpiable crime of being wiser than his
generation.

Some have complained of Gibbon's 'hero-worship' of Dietrich--I do not.
The honest and accurate cynic so very seldom worshipped a hero, or
believed in the existence of any, that we may take his good opinion as
almost final and without appeal. One author, for whose opinion I have
already exprest a very high respect, says that he was but a wild man of
the woods to the last; polished over skin-deep with Roman civilization;
'Scratch him, and you found the barbarian underneath {101}.' It may be
true. If it be true, it is a very high compliment. It was not from his
Roman civilization, but from his 'barbarian' mother and father, that he
drew the 'vive intelligence des choses morales, et ces inspirations
elevees et he