ncture, the starving and 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 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
empty counter, the beggar rises from his kennel in the butcher's vacant
out-house, the slave deserts his place by the smouldering
kitchen-fire--all hurry to swell the numbers of the guests that are
bidden to the wretched feast. Rapidly and confusedly, the congregation
in the basilica pours through its lofty gates; the priests and
penitents retire from the altar's foot, and in the great church, so
crowded but a few moments before, there now only remains the figure of
a solitary man.

Since the commencement of the service, neither addressed nor observed,
this lonely being has faltered round the circle of