ttended with an increasing expense;
the cost of his buildings, his court, and his festivals required an
immediate and plentiful supply; and the oppression of the people was the
only fund which could support the magnificence of the sovereign. His
unworthy favorites, enriched by the boundless liberality of their
master, usurped with impunity the privilege of rapine and corruption. A
secret but universal decay was felt in every part of the public
administration; and the Emperor himself, though he still retained the
obedience, gradually lost the esteem of his subjects. The dress and
manners which towards the decline of life he chose to affect, served
only to degrade him in the eyes of mankind. The Asiatic pomp which had
been adopted by the pride of Diocletian assumed an air of softness and
effeminacy in the person of Constantine. He is represented with false
hair of various colors, laboriously arranged by the skillful artists of
the times; a diadem of a new and more expensive fashion; a profusion of
gems and pearls, of collars and bracelets, and a variegated flowing robe
of silk, most curiously embroidered with flowers of gold. In such
apparel, scarcely to be excused by the youth and folly of Elagabulus, we
are at a loss to discover the wisdom of an aged monarch and the
simplicity of a Roman veteran. A mind thus relaxed by prosperity and
indulgence was incapable of rising to that magnanimity which disdains
suspicion and dares to forgive. The deaths of Maximian and Licinius may
perhaps be justified by the maxims of policy as they are taught in the
schools of tyrants; but an impartial narrative of the executions, or
rather murders, which sullied the declining age of Constantine, will
suggest to our most candid thoughts the idea of a prince who could
sacrifice without reluctance the laws of justice and the feelings of
nature, to the dictates either of his passions or of his interest.

The same fortune which so invariably followed the standard of
Constantine seemed to secure the hopes and comforts of his domestic
life. Those among his predecessors who had enjoyed the longest and most
prosperous reigns, Augustus, Trajan, and Diocletian, had been
disappointed of posterity; and the frequent revolutions had never
allowed sufficient time for any imperial family to grow up and multiply
under the shade of the purple. But the royalty of the Flavian line,
which had been first ennobled by the Gothic Claudius, descended through
several ge