he renown of my father."

The authoress felt assured that a number of disturbances of nature and
mysterious occurrences as interpreted by the soothsayers, foreboded the
death of Alexius; thus she claimed for her father the indications of
consequence, which were regarded by the ancients as necessary
intimations of the sympathy of nature with the removal of great
characters--from the world. During his latter days, the emperor was
afflicted with the gout. Weakened in body, and gradually losing his
native energy, he once responded to the empress, when she spoke of how
his deeds would be handed down in history: "The passages of my unhappy
life call rather for tears and lamentations than for the praises you
speak of." Finally asthma came to the assistance of the gout, and the
prayers of monks and clergy, as well as the lavish distribution of alms,
failed to stay the progress of the disease. At length passed away the
Emperor Alexius, who, with all his faults, was one of the best
sovereigns of the Eastern Empire.

His learned daughter, in the greatness of her grief, threw aside the
reserve of literary eminence, and burst into tears and shrieks, tearing
her hair, and defacing her countenance, while the Empress Irene cut off
her hair, changed her purple buskins for black mourning shoes, and,
casting from her her princely robes, put on a robe of black. "Even at
the moment when she put it on," adds Anna, "the emperor gave up the
ghost, and in that moment the sun of my life set."

Anna continues to express her lamentations at her loss, and upbraids
herself that she survived her father, "that light of the world"; Irene,
"the delight alike of the East and of the West"; and, also, her husband,
Nicephorus. "I am indignant," she adds, "that my soul, suffering under
such torrents of misfortune, should still deign to animate my body. Have
I not been more hard and unfeeling than the rocks themselves; and is it
not just that one who could survive such a father and a mother and such
a husband should be subjected to the influence of so much calamity? But
let me finish this history, rather than any longer fatigue my readers
with my unavailing and tragical lamentation!" The history then closes
with the following couplet:

"The learned Comnena lays her pen aside,
What time her subject and her father died."

Taking it all in all, the best appreciation of the _Alexiad_ is that of
Gibbon, who thus characterizes the qualities of the