ved their origin, he
maintained a frequent and friendly correspondence: the Italians were
clothed in the rich sables of Sweden; and one of its sovereigns, after
a voluntary or reluctant abdication, found a hospitable retreat in the
palace of Ravenna. He had reigned over one of the thirteen populous
tribes who cultivated a small portion of the great island or peninsula
of Scandinavia, to which the vague appellation of Thule has been
sometimes applied. That northern region was peopled, or had been
explored, as high as the sixty-eighth degree of latitude, where the
natives of the polar circle enjoy and lose the presence of the sun at
each summer and winter solstice during an equal period of forty days.
The long night of his absence or death was the mournful season of
distress and anxiety, till the messengers, who had been sent to
the mountain tops, descried the first rays of returning light, and
proclaimed to the plain below the festival of his resurrection.

The life of Theodoric represents the rare and meritorious example of a
Barbarian, who sheathed his sword in the pride of victory and the vigor
of his age. A reign of three and thirty years was consecrated to
the duties of civil government, and the hostilities, in which he was
sometimes involved, were speedily terminated by the conduct of his
lieutenants, the discipline of his troops, the arms of his allies, and
even by the terror of his name. He reduced, under a strong and regular
government, the unprofitable countries of Rhaetia, Noricum, Dalmatia,
and Pannonia, from the source of the Danube and the territory of the
Bavarians, to the petty kingdom erected by the Gepidae on the ruins of
Sirmium. His prudence could not safely intrust the bulwark of Italy to
such feeble and turbulent neighbors; and his justice might claim the
lands which they oppressed, either as a part of his kingdom, or as the
inheritance of his father. The greatness of a servant, who was named
perfidious because he was successful, awakened the jealousy of the
emperor Anastasius; and a war was kindled on the Dacian frontier, by the
protection which the Gothic king, in the vicissitude of human affairs,
had granted to one of the descendants of Attila. Sabinian, a general
illustrious by his own and father's merit, advanced at the head of ten
thousand Romans; and the provisions and arms, which filled a long train
of wagons, were distributed to the fiercest of the Bulgarian tribes.
But in the fields of Mar