ow but one side of the question. The
Romans could write; the Goths could not: they may have been able to make
out a fair case for themselves; they may have believed truly in the guilt
of Boethius; and if they did, nothing less could have happened, by such
rules of public law and justice as were then in vogue, than did happen.

Be that as it may, the deed was done; and the punishment, if deserved,
came soon enough. Sitting at dinner (so the story runs), the head of a
fish took in Dietrich's fancy the shape of Symmachus' head, the upper
teeth biting the lip, the great eyes staring at him. He sprang up in
horror; took to his bed; and there, complaining of a mortal chill,
wrapping himself up in heaps of blankets, and bewailing to his physician
the death of his two victims, he died sadly in a few days. And a certain
holy hermit, name not given, nor date of the vision, saw the ghosts of
Boethius and Symmachus lead the Amal's soul up the cone of Stromboli, and
hurl him in, as the English sailors saw old Boots, the Wapping usurer,
hurled into the same place, for offences far more capable of proof.

So runs the story of Dietrich's death. It is perfectly natural, and very
likely true. His contemporaries, who all believed it, saw in it proof of
his enormous guilt, and the manifest judgment of God. We shall rather
see in it a proof of the earnest, child-like, honest nature of the man,
startled into boundless horror and self-abasement, by the sudden
revelation of his crime. Truly bad men die easier deaths than that; and
go down to the grave, for the most part, blind and self-contented, and,
as they think, unpunished; and perhaps forgiven.

After Dietrich came the deluge. The royal head was gone. The royal
heart remained in Amalasuentha 'the heavenly beauty,' a daughter worthy
of her father.

One of her first acts was to restore to the widows and children of the
two victims the estates which Dietrich had confiscated. That may, or may
not, prove that she thought the men innocent. She may have only felt it
royal not to visit the sins of the fathers on the children; and those
fathers, too, her own friends and preceptors. Beautiful, learned, and
wise, she too was, like her father, before her age. She, the pupil of
Boethius, would needs bring up her son Athalaric in Roman learning, and
favour the Romans in all ways; never putting to death or even fining any
of them, and keeping down the rough Goths, who were ready enough,