Hardly less attractive is Gratian’s affection for his other tutor, Ausonius, whom, even in the urgency of affairs and the stress of war, he never forgets, taking time to send him a letter or a gift, remembering even the poet’s harmless weaknesses, and making a long journey so as to assist in person at the investiture with the Consulship, which Gratian had bestowed upon him, thus crowning the highest ambition of the good man’s heart. Yet, what a contrast the two teachers present! Ambrose, the “golden-mouthed” indeed, but inflexible, the unconquerable fighter for the independence of the Church, the judge of his Emperor Theodosius, whom he punishes—during eight long months—for the Thessalonian massacre, by forbidding him to enter the sanctuary till he has repented of his cruelty publicly in dust and ashes before its threshold—and Ausonius, the “tranquil and indulgent man, mild of voice and eye,” rejoicing in the beauties of his lovely home by the Moselle, bringing the exquisite freshness of a summer morning before us as few others have done, his sincere Christianity all warmed and illumined by his born kinship with Nature and his gratitude to the Creator; yet so human in his fluttering delight at Gratian’s favours, his innocent triumph when the young Emperor not only associates him with himself in the Consulship, but sends him the very purple robe embroidered with palm branches which the great Constantine had worn on the same occasion. It is difficult to understand how the grandson of “Gratian the rope-maker”—that rough country lad who wandered into the Roman camp at Cibalæ in Pannonia to sell his wares, and so pleased the soldiers by his strength and audacity that they kept him with them—should have come to be the very model and ideal of a gentle knight, both in heart and person. He seems far more nearly allied to the noble Constantine, of whom he speaks indeed as a parent, but only on the ground of having married his granddaughter Constantia. It was an age when the unending ramifications of the various Imperial families furnished more occupants for thrones than there were thrones to occupy, and in which a successful claimant could almost always find a royal bride with whose name to strengthen his own hold on power. Add to this multiplicity of true heirs the numberless usurpers who struck but for themselves, or those whom the different Legions raised to the purple for their own ends (“barrack Emperors” as our own great historian, Thomas Hodgkin, called them), and you have such a bewildering crowd of Emperors and sham Emperors, of usurpers and rival usurpers, that one can scarcely remember their names, and their histories only awake a passing thrill of pity for the violent ends to which most of them came.