the grave; his mind was humbled by the contrast of
the past, and justly alarmed by the invisible terrors of futurity. One
evening, as it is related, when the head of a large fish was served
on the royal table, he suddenly exclaimed, that he beheld the angry
countenance of Symmachus, his eyes glaring fury and revenge, and his
mouth armed with long sharp teeth, which threatened to devour him. The
monarch instantly retired to his chamber, and, as he lay, trembling
with aguish cold, under a weight of bed-clothes, he expressed, in broken
murmurs to his physician Elpidius, his deep repentance for the murders
of Boethius and Symmachus. His malady increased, and after a dysentery
which continued three days, he expired in the palace of Ravenna, in
the thirty-third, or, if we compute from the invasion of Italy, in the
thirty-seventh year of his reign. Conscious of his approaching end, he
divided his treasures and provinces between his two grandsons, and fixed
the Rhone as their common boundary. Amalaric was restored to the
throne of Spain. Italy, with all the conquests of the Ostrogoths, was
bequeathed to Athalaric; whose age did not exceed ten years, but who
was cherished as the last male offspring of the line of Amali, by the
short-lived marriage of his mother Amalasuntha with a royal fugitive of
the same blood. In the presence of the dying monarch, the Gothic chiefs
and Italian magistrates mutually engaged their faith and loyalty to
the young prince, and to his guardian mother; and received, in the same
awful moment, his last salutary advice, to maintain the laws, to love
the senate and people of Rome, and to cultivate with decent reverence
the friendship of the emperor. The monument of Theodoric was erected by
his daughter Amalasuntha, in a conspicuous situation, which commanded
the city of Ravenna, the harbor, and the adjacent coast. A chapel of
a circular form, thirty feet in diameter, is crowned by a dome of one
entire piece of granite: from the centre of the dome four columns arose,
which supported, in a vase of porphyry, the remains of the Gothic king,
surrounded by the brazen statues of the twelve apostles. His spirit,
after some previous expiation, might have been permitted to mingle with
the benefactors of mankind, if an Italian hermit had not been witness,
in a vision, to the damnation of Theodoric, whose soul was plunged, by
the ministers of divine vengeance, into the volcano of Lipari, one of
the flaming mouths of th