the Celt was dissolute" (_id._ p. 6). It is perhaps arguable that the early Teuton had a moral code peculiar to himself. Sismondi (_Fall_, i, 246) remarks, concerning Clothaire's son Gontran, called by Gregory "the good king Gontran," as compared with his brothers: "His morality indeed passed for good; he is only known to have had two wives and one mistress, and he repudiated the first before he married the second; his temper was, moreover, reputed to be a kindly one, for, with the exception of his wife's physician, who was hewn in pieces because he was unable to cure her; of his two brothers-in-law, whom he caused to be assassinated; and of his bastard brother, Gondebald, who was slain by treachery, no other act of cruelty is recorded of him than that he razed the town of Cominges to the ground and massacred all the inhabitants, men, women, and children." Sismondi has also appreciated (p. 205) what Gibbon has missed, the point of the letter of St. Avitus to Gondebald of Burgundy, who had killed his three brothers, exhorting him "to weep no longer with such ineffable piety the death of his brothers, since it was the good fortune of the kingdom which diminished the number of persons invested with royal authority, and preserved to the world such only as were necessary to rule it." Cp. Sismondi's _Hist. des Français_, i, 173. A great name, such as Theodoric's, tends to dazzle the eye that looks on the history of the time; but the great name, on scrutiny, is seen to stand for all the progress made in a generation. Theodoric, though he would never learn to read,[463] had a civilised education as regards the arts of government, and what was masterly in his rule may at least as well be attributed to that as to his barbaric stock.[464] It is important to note that in his reign, by reason of being forced to live on her own products, Italy actually attains the capacity to export grain after feeding herself[465]--a result to which the king's rule may conceivably have contributed.[466] In any case, the able ruler represents but a moment of order in an epic of anarchy.[467] After Theodoric, four kings in turn are assassinated, each by his successor; and the new monarchy begins to go the way of the old. What Belisarius began Narses finished, turning to his ends the hatreds between the Teutonic tribes. Narses gone, a fresh wave of barbarism flowed in under Alboin the Longobard, who in due course was assassinated by his outraged wife; and his successor was assassinated in turn. Yet again, the new barbarism began to wear all the features of disorderly decay; and the Longobard kingdom subsisted for over two hundred years, under twenty-one kings, without decisively conquering Venetia, or the Romagna, or Rome, or the Greek municipalities of the south.[468] Then came the Frankish conquest, completed under Charlemagne, on the invitation of the Pope,