believed that the Goths would ere long impatiently abandon their
protracted blockade, to stretch their ravages over the rich and
unprotected fields of Southern Italy. But the same blind confidence in
the lost terrors of the Roman name, the same fierce and reckless
determination to defy the Goths to the very last, sustained the sinking
courage and suppressed the despondent emotions of the great mass of the
suffering people, from the beggar who prowled for garbage, to the
patrician who sighed over his new and unwelcome nourishment of simple
bread.

While the penitents who formed the procession above described were yet
engaged in the performance of their unnoticed and unshared duties of
penance and prayer, a priest ascended the great pulpit of the basilica,
to attempt the ungrateful task of preaching patience and piety to the
hungry multitude at his feet.

He began his sermon by retracing the principal occurrences in Rome since
the beginning of the Gothic blockade. He touched cautiously upon the
first event that stained the annals of the besieged city--the execution
of the widow of the Roman general Stilicho, on the unauthorised
suspicion that she had held treasonable communication with Alaric and
the invading army; he noticed lengthily the promises of assistance
transmitted from Ravenna, after the perpetration of that ill-omened act.
He spoke admiringly of the skill displayed by the government in making
the necessary and immediate reductions in the daily supplies of food; he
lamented the terrible scarcity which followed, too inevitably, those
seasonable reductions. He pronounced an eloquent eulogium on the noble
charity of Laeta, the widow of the Emperor Gratian, who, with her
mother, devoted the store of provisions obtained by their imperial
revenues to succouring, at that important juncture, the starving and