the
propriety of his measures were compelled to acknowledge that he
possessed magnanimity to conceive and patience to execute the most
arduous designs, without being checked either by the prejudices of
education or by the clamors of the multitude. In the field he infused
his own intrepid spirit into the troops, whom he conducted with the
talents of a consummate general; and to his abilities, rather than to
his fortune, we may ascribe the signal victories which he obtained over
the foreign and domestic foes of the republic. He loved glory as the
reward, perhaps as the motive, of his labors. The boundless ambition
which, from the moment of his accepting the purple at York, appears as
the ruling passion of his soul, may be justified by the dangers of his
own situation, by the character of his rivals, by the consciousness of
superior merit, and by the prospect that his success would enable him to
restore peace and order to the distracted empire. In his civil wars
against Maxentius and Licinius he had engaged on his side the
inclinations of the people, who compared the undissembled vices of those
tyrants with the spirit of wisdom and justice which seemed to direct the
general tenor of the administration of Constantine.

Had Constantine fallen on the banks of the Tiber, or even in the plains
of Hadrianople, such is the character which, with a few exceptions, he
might have transmitted to posterity. But the conclusion of his reign
(according to the moderate and indeed tender sentence of a writer of the
same age) degraded him from the rank which he had acquired among the
most deserving of the Roman princes. In the life of Augustus we behold
the tyrant of the republic converted, almost by imperceptible degrees,
into the father of his country and of human kind. In that of Constantine
we may contemplate a hero who had so long inspired his subjects with
love and his enemies with terror, degenerating into a cruel and
dissolute monarch, corrupted by his fortune or raised by conquest above
the necessity of dissimulation. The general peace which he maintained
during the last fourteen years of his reign was a period of apparent
splendor rather than of real prosperity; and the old age of Constantine
was disgraced by the opposite yet reconcilable vices of rapaciousness
and prodigality. The accumulated treasures found in the palaces of
Maxentius and Licinius were lavishly consumed; the various innovations
introduced by the conqueror were a