ve; the triumphant progress of Venus over her native seas, and the
mild influence which her presence diffused in the palace of Milan,
express to every age the natural sentiments of the heart, in the just
and pleasing language of allegorical fiction. But the amorous impatience
which Claudian attributes to the young prince, [59] must excite the
smiles of the court; and his beauteous spouse (if she deserved the
praise of beauty) had not much to fear or to hope from the passions of
her lover. Honorius was only in the fourteenth year of his age;
Serena, the mother of his bride, deferred, by art of persuasion, the
consummation of the royal nuptials; Maria died a virgin, after she had
been ten years a wife; and the chastity of the emperor was secured
by the coldness, perhaps, the debility,of his constitution. [60]
His subjects, who attentively studied the character of their young
sovereign, discovered that Honorius was without passions, and
consequently without talents; and that his feeble and languid
disposition was alike incapable of discharging the duties of his rank,
or of enjoying the pleasures of his age. In his early youth he made some
progress in the exercises of riding and drawing the bow: but he soon
relinquished these fatiguing occupations, and the amusement of feeding
poultry became the serious and daily care of the monarch of the West,
[61] who resigned the reins of empire to the firm and skilful hand of
his guardian Stilicho. The experience of history will countenance the
suspicion that a prince who was born in the purple, received a worse
education than the meanest peasant of his dominions; and that the
ambitious minister suffered him to attain the age of manhood, without
attempting to excite his courage, or to enlighten his under standing.
[62] The predecessors of Honorius were accustomed to animate by their
example, or at least by their presence, the valor of the legions; and
the dates of their laws attest the perpetual activity of their motions
through the provinces of the Roman world. But the son of Theodosius
passed the slumber of his life, a captive in his palace, a stranger in
his country, and the patient, almost the indifferent, spectator of the
ruin of the Western empire, which was repeatedly attacked, and finally
subverted, by the arms of the Barbarians. In the eventful history of a
reign of twenty-eight years, it will seldom be necessary to mention the
name of the emperor Honorius.

[Footnote 58: Clau