g
prostrate on the coffin, implored, in the name of his guilty parents,
Arcadius and Eudoxia, the forgiveness of the injured saint.

Chapter XXXII: Emperors Arcadius, Eutropius, Theodosius II.--Part III.

Yet a reasonable doubt may be entertained, whether any stain of
hereditary guilt could be derived from Arcadius to his successor.
Eudoxia was a young and beautiful woman, who indulged her passions,
and despised her husband; Count John enjoyed, at least, the familiar
confidence of the empress; and the public named him as the real father
of Theodosius the younger. The birth of a son was accepted, however,
by the pious husband, as an event the most fortunate and honorable to
himself, to his family, and to the Eastern world: and the royal infant,
by an unprecedented favor, was invested with the titles of Caesar and
Augustus. In less than four years afterwards, Eudoxia, in the bloom
of youth, was destroyed by the consequences of a miscarriage; and this
untimely death confounded the prophecy of a holy bishop, who, amidst the
universal joy, had ventured to foretell, that she should behold the long
and auspicious reign of her glorious son. The Catholics applauded the
justice of Heaven, which avenged the persecution of St. Chrysostom; and
perhaps the emperor was the only person who sincerely bewailed the
loss of the haughty and rapacious Eudoxia. Such a domestic misfortune
afflicted _him_ more deeply than the public calamities of the East;
the licentious excursions, from Pontus to Palestine, of the Isaurian
robbers, whose impunity accused the weakness of the government; and the
earthquakes, the conflagrations, the famine, and the flights of locusts,
which the popular discontent was equally disposed to attribute to the
incapacity of the monarch. At length, in the thirty-first year of his
age, after a reign (if we may abuse that word) of thirteen years,
three months, and fifteen days, Arcadius expired in the palace of
Constantinople. It is impossible to delineate his character; since, in
a period very copiously furnished with historical materials, it has not
been possible to remark one action that properly belongs to the son of
the great Theodosius.

The historian Procopius has indeed illuminated the mind of the dying
emperor with a ray of human prudence, or celestial wisdom. Arcadius
considered, with anxious foresight, the helpless condition of his son
Theodosius, who was no more than seven years of age, the dangerous
f