he time of the empress; and in the
arch over the door is a fine representation of the Good Shepherd. Behind
the altar is the massive sarcophagus of marble (its cover of silver
plates was long ago torn off) in which are literally the ashes of
the empress. She was immured in it as a mummy, in a sitting position,
clothed in imperial robes; and there the ghastly corpse sat in a
cypress-wood chair, to be looked at by anybody who chose to peep through
the aperture, for more than eleven hundred years, till one day, in 1577,
some children introduced a lighted candle, perhaps out of compassion for
her who sat so long in darkness, when her clothes caught fire, and she
was burned up,--a warning to all children not to play with a dead and
dry empress. In this resting-place are also the tombs of Honorius II.,
her brother, of Constantius III., her second husband, and of Honoria,
her daughter.

There are no other undisturbed tombs of the Caesars in existence. Hers
is almost the last, and the very small last, of a great succession. What
thoughts of a great empire in ruins do not force themselves on one in
the confined walls of this little chamber! What a woman was she whose
ashes lie there! She saw and aided the ruin of the empire; but it may be
said of her, that her vices were greater than her misfortunes. And
what a story is her life! Born to the purple, educated in the palace at
Constantinople, accomplished but not handsome, at the age of twenty she
was in Rome when Alaric besieged it. Carried off captive by the Goths,
she became the not unwilling object of the passion of King Adolphus, who
at length married her at Narbonne. At the nuptials the king, in a
Roman habit, occupied a seat lower than hers, while she sat on a throne
habited as a Roman empress, and received homage. Fifty handsome youths
bore to her in each hand a dish of gold, one filled with coin, and the
other with precious stones,--a small part only, these hundred vessels
of treasure, of the spoils the Goths brought from her country. When
Adolphus, who never abated his fondness for his Roman bride, was
assassinated at Barcelona, she was treated like a slave by his
assassins, and driven twelve miles on foot before the horse of his
murderer. Ransomed at length for six hundred thousand measures of wheat
by her brother Honorius, who handed her over struggling to Constantius,
one of his generals. But, once married, her reluctance ceased; and she
set herself to advance the int