desponding poor: he admitted the new scarcity, consequent on the
dissipation of Laeta's stores; deplored the present necessity of
sacrificing the domestic animals of the citizens; condemned the enormous
prices now demanded for the last remnants of wholesome food that were
garnered up; announced it as the firm persuasion of every one that a few
days more would bring help from Ravenna; and ended his address by
informing his auditory that, as they had suffered so much already, they
could patiently suffer a little more, and that if, after this, they were
so ill-fated as to sink under their calamities, they would feel it a
noble consolation to die in the cause of Catholic and Apostolic Rome,
and would assuredly be canonised as saints and martyrs by the next
generation of the pious in the first interval of fertile and restoring
peace.

Flowing as was the eloquence of this oration, it yet possessed not the
power of inducing one among those whom it addressed to forget the
sensation of his present suffering, and to fix his attention on the
vision of future advantage, spread before all listeners by the fluent
priest. With the same murmurs of querulous complaint, and the same
expressions of impotent hatred and and defiance of the Goths which had
fallen from them as they entered the church, the populace now departed
from it, to receive from the city officers the stinted allowance of
repugnant food, prepared for their hunger from the caldron in the public
square.

And see, already from other haunts in the neighbouring quarter of Rome
their fellow-citizens press onward at the given signal, to meet them
round the caldron's sides! The languid sentinel, released from duty,
turns his gaze from the sickening prospect of the Gothic camp, and
hastens to share the public meal; the baker starts from sleeping on his