ced slowly to the altar. It was composed both of men
and women barefooted, clothed in black garments, and with ashes
scattered over their dishevelled hair. Tears flowed from their eyes,
and they beat their breasts as they bowed their foreheads on the marble
pavement of the altar steps.

This humble public expression of penitence under the calamity that had
now fallen on the city was, however, confined only to its few really
religious inhabitants, and commanded neither sympathy nor attention
from the heartless and obstinate population of Rome. Some still
cherished the delusive hope of assistance from the court at Ravenna;
others 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
ju