el, and the other Innocence--which latter, when she had
devoured a sufficiency of his living victims, he set free in the forests
as a reward for her services--a brutal tyrant, whose only virtue seems to
have been his chastity); and Valens, the shameless extortioner who
perished in that great battle of Adrianople, of which more hereafter. The
last five remaining books of the honest soldier's story are a tissue of
horrors, from reading which one turns away as from a slaughter-house or a
witches' sabbath.

No one, again, will think these statements exaggerated who knows
Salvian's De Gubernatione Dei. It has been always and most justly held
in high esteem, as one great authority of the state of Gaul when
conquered by the Franks and Goths and Vandals.

Salvian was a Christian gentleman, born somewhere near Treves. He
married a Pagan lady of Cologne, converted her, had by her a daughter,
and then persuaded her to devote herself to celibacy, while he did the
like. His father-in-law, Hypatius, quarrelled with him on this account;
and the letter in which he tries to soothe the old man is still extant, a
curious specimen of the style of cultivated men in that day. Salvian
then went down to the south of France and became a priest at Marseilles,
and tutor to the sons of Eucherius, the Bishop of Lyons. Eucherius,
himself a good man, speaks in terms of passionate admiration of Salvian,
his goodness, sanctity, learning, talents. Gennadius (who describes him
as still living when he wrote, about 490) calls him among other
encomiums, the Master of Bishops; and both mention familiarly this very
work, by which he became notorious in his own day, and which he wrote
about 450 or 455, during the invasion of the Britons. So that we may
trust fully that we have hold of an authentic contemporaneous work,
written by a good man and true.

Let me first say a few words on the fact of his having--as many good men
did then--separated from his wife in order to lead what was called a
religious life. It has a direct bearing on the History of those days.
One must not praise him because he (in common with all Christians of his
day) held, no doubt, the belief that marriage was a degradation in
itself; that though the Church might mend it somewhat by exalting it into
a sacrament, still, the less of a bad thing the better:--a doctrine
against which one need not use (thank God) in England, the same language
which Michelet has most justly used in Fra