the legal supremacy, of the church; and
his firm administration restored or extended some useful prerogatives
which had been neglected by the feeble emperors of the West. He was not
ignorant of the dignity and importance of the Roman pontiff, to whom the
venerable name of Pope was now appropriated. The peace or the revolt of
Italy might depend on the character of a wealthy and popular bishop,
who claimed such ample dominion both in heaven and earth; who had been
declared in a numerous synod to be pure from all sin, and exempt from
all judgment. When the chair of St. Peter was disputed by Symmachus and
Laurence, they appeared at his summons before the tribunal of an Arian
monarch, and he confirmed the election of the most worthy or the most
obsequious candidate. At the end of his life, in a moment of jealousy
and resentment, he prevented the choice of the Romans, by nominating
a pope in the palace of Ravenna. The danger and furious contests of a
schism were mildly restrained, and the last decree of the senate was
enacted to extinguish, if it were possible, the scandalous venality of
the papal elections.

I have descanted with pleasure on the fortunate condition of Italy; but
our fancy must not hastily conceive that the golden age of the poets,
a race of men without vice or misery, was realized under the Gothic
conquest. The fair prospect was sometimes overcast with clouds; the
wisdom of Theodoric might be deceived, his power might be resisted and
the declining age of the monarch was sullied with popular hatred and
patrician blood. In the first insolence of victory, he had been tempted
to deprive the whole party of Odoacer of the civil and even the natural
rights of society; a tax unseasonably imposed after the calamities
of war, would have crushed the rising agriculture of Liguria; a rigid
preemption of corn, which was intended for the public relief, must
have aggravated the distress of Campania. These dangerous projects were
defeated by the virtue and eloquence of Epiphanius and Boethius, who, in
the presence of Theodoric himself, successfully pleaded the cause of the
people: but if the royal ear was open to the voice of truth, a saint
and a philosopher are not always to be found at the ear of kings. The
privileges of rank, or office, or favor, were too frequently abused by
Italian fraud and Gothic violence, and the avarice of the king's nephew
was publicly exposed, at first by the usurpation, and afterwards by
the res