“I send this by a trusty hand; if for safety’s sake thou makest it into a palimpsest, write over it these words—_Placidus semivir amens_. “The whole of this Imperial city, the whole Empire, at this moment seem but a mausoleum for the Augusta, last of the Romans. For Aetius, alas! the other name of which Ravenna is full, seems no leader likely to preserve the noblest in the old world or the new. He is indeed capable of ruling every one, and capable of understanding everything. To him come ‘the groans of the forsaken Britons’; to him the embassies of the conquering Hun. Living as a hostage three years among the Huns, he knows Attila and his people intimately. Chief minister of the Augusta for seventeen years, he knows the Empire to the core of its corrupt heart. He has conquered the Franks, defended the Empire, and will, it seems, conciliate the Goths. But here they cannot forgive or forget his base treachery to Boniface his friend, Count of Africa, tempting him to rebel by false representations of the enmity of the Augusta, and throwing him into alliance with the Vandals in Africa; thus losing Rome her noblest general in Boniface, her richest granary in Africa, and the Church the whole province of Africa, the home of Perpetua, Cyprian, Monica, Augustine. “Yet there is no one to follow but Aetius; and I am going northward to Gaul. There is hope of an alliance with the Goths, and with their aid we may beat back the Huns. “Tell our Luciola I have no drops as yet from the Fountain of Youth for her. How indeed could we expect any from Ravenna, this city of mud and marshes—of every kind of mud and every kind of marshy malaria, where water they say is often scarcer and dearer than wine? Fleets of merchant ships, crowds of sailors of all nations, splendid palaces and more splendid churches; but Living Water, the Fountain of Youth; scarcely here!” His next letter was from Aquileia, the great port of the north of the Adriatic, where his family had had friendships from the days of Jerome, who was born there. “This is a very great city, great with the natural greatness of its commanding position, guarded by the mountains, guarding the frontier, and commanding the Adriatic; great with the natural growth of its world-wide commerce, no mere artificial product of a heated court.