e, and insulted the misery of the people. Anna is a faithful
witness that his happiness was destroyed, and his health was broken, by
the cares of a public life; the patience of Constantinople was fatigued
by the length and severity of his reign; and before Alexius expired, he
had lost the love and reverence of his subjects. The clergy could not
forgive his application of the sacred riches to the defence of the
state; but they applauded his theological learning and ardent zeal for
the orthodox faith, which he defended with his tongue, his pen, and his
sword. His character was degraded by the superstition of the Greeks; and
the same inconsistent principle of human nature enjoined the emperor to
found a hospital for the poor and infirm, and to direct the execution
of a heretic, who was burned alive in the square of St. Sophia. Even
the sincerity of his moral and religious virtues was suspected by the
persons who had passed their lives in his familiar confidence. In
his last hours, when he was pressed by his wife Irene to alter the
succession, he raised his head, and breathed a pious ejaculation on
the vanity of this world. The indignant reply of the empress may be
inscribed as an epitaph on his tomb, "You die, as you have lived--a
Hypocrite!"

It was the wish of Irene to supplant the eldest of her surviving sons,
in favor of her daughter the princess Anne whose philosophy would not
have refused the weight of a diadem. But the order of male succession
was asserted by the friends of their country; the lawful heir drew the
royal signet from the finger of his insensible or conscious father and
the empire obeyed the master of the palace. Anna Comnena was stimulated
by ambition and revenge to conspire against the life of her brother, and
when the design was prevented by the fears or scruples of her husband,
she passionately exclaimed that nature had mistaken the two sexes, and
had endowed Bryennius with the soul of a woman. The two sons of Alexius,
John and Isaac, maintained the fraternal concord, the hereditary virtue
of their race, and the younger brother was content with the title of
_Sebastocrator_, which approached the dignity, without sharing the
power, of the emperor. In the same person the claims of primogeniture
and merit were fortunately united; his swarthy complexion, harsh
features, and diminutive stature, had suggested the ironical surname of
Calo-Johannes, or John the Handsome, which his grateful subjects more
seri