punishment is just enough; but
why should Cassiodorus (certainly not King Dietrich) finish a short
letter by a long dissertation on volcanoes in general, and Stromboli in
particular, insisting on the wonder that the rocks, though continually
burnt, are continually renewed by 'the inextricable potency of nature;'
and only returning to Jovinus to inform him that he will henceforth
follow the example of a salamander, which always lives in fire, 'being so
contracted by natural cold, that it is tempered by burning flame. It is
a thin and small animal, connected with worms, and clothed with a yellow
colour;' . . . Cassiodorus then returns to the main subject of volcanoes,
and ends with a story of Stromboli having broken out just as Hannibal
poisoned himself at the court of Prusias;--information which may have
been interesting, though not consoling, to poor Jovinus, in the prospect
of living there; but of which one would like to have had king Dietrich's
opinion. Did he felicitate himself like a simple Teuton, on the
wonderful learning and eloquence of his Greek-Roman secretary? Or did he
laugh a royal laugh at the whole letter, and crack a royal joke at
Cassiodorus and all quill-driving schoolmasters and lawyers--the two
classes of men whom the Goths hated especially, and at the end to which
they by their pedantries had brought imperial Rome? One would like to
know. For not only was Dietrich no scholar himself, but he had a
contempt for the very scholarship which he employed, and forbade the
Goths to learn it--as the event proved, a foolish and fatal prejudice.
But it was connected in his mind with chicanery, effeminacy, and with the
cruel and degrading punishments of children. Perhaps the ferula had been
applied to him at Constantinople in old days. If so, no wonder that he
never learnt to write. 'The boy who trembles at a cane,' he used to say,
'will never face a lance.' His mother wit, meanwhile, was so shrewd that
'many of his sayings (says the unknown author of the invaluable Valesian
Fragment) remain among us to this day.' Two only, as far as I know, have
been preserved, quaint enough:

'He that hath gold, or a devil, cannot hide it.'

And

'The Roman, when poor, apes the Goth: the Goth,
when rich, apes the Roman.'

There is a sort of Solomon's judgment, too, told of him, in the case of a
woman who refused to acknowledge her own son, which was effectual enough;
but somewhat too homely to repeat.