ner, Catalog.
Mss. Bibliot. Bern. tom. i. p. 287) charges him home with honorable and
patriotic treason.]

While Boethius, oppressed with fetters, expected each moment the
sentence or the stroke of death, he composed, in the tower of Pavia, the
Consolation of Philosophy; a golden volume not unworthy of the leisure
of Plato or Tully, but which claims incomparable merit from the
barbarism of the times and the situation of the author. The celestial
guide, whom he had so long invoked at Rome and Athens, now condescended
to illumine his dungeon, to revive his courage, and to pour into his
wounds her salutary balm. She taught him to compare his long prosperity
and his recent distress, and to conceive new hopes from the inconstancy
of fortune. Reason had informed him of the precarious condition of her
gifts; experience had satisfied him of their real value; he had enjoyed
them without guilt; he might resign them without a sigh, and calmly
disdain the impotent malice of his enemies, who had left him happiness,
since they had left him virtue. From the earth, Boethius ascended
to heaven in search of the Supreme Good; explored the metaphysical
labyrinth of chance and destiny, of prescience and free will, of
time and eternity; and generously attempted to reconcile the perfect
attributes of the Deity with the apparent disorders of his moral and
physical government. Such topics of consolation so obvious, so vague, or
so abstruse, are ineffectual to subdue the feelings of human nature. Yet
the sense of misfortune may be diverted by the labor of thought; and the
sage who could artfully combine in the same work the various riches
of philosophy, poetry, and eloquence, must already have possessed the
intrepid calmness which he affected to seek. Suspense, the worst of
evils, was at length determined by the ministers of death, who executed,
and perhaps exceeded, the inhuman mandate of Theodoric. A strong cord
was fastened round the head of Boethius, and forcibly tightened, till
his eyes almost started from their sockets; and some mercy may be
discovered in the milder torture of beating him with clubs till he
expired. [98] But his genius survived to diffuse a ray of knowledge over
the darkest ages of the Latin world; the writings of the philosopher
were translated by the most glorious of the English kings, [99] and the
third emperor of the name of Otho removed to a more honorable tomb the
bones of a Catholic saint, who, from his Arian persec