Orleans, she has none. Her intervention was critically timed. The nobles were beginning to be ashamed of allowing a foreign power to dominate over the fair fields of France; the patience of the people under an oppressive yoke was exhausted; the English leaders, brave and wise as they were, were many and divided, under a minor king of weak character even when a man. In addition to these causes all beginning to operate favourably for France, Charles VII. was becoming of an age to perceive his legitimate course, and if he had not shaken off the trammels of sloth and pleasure, occasionally showed some little scintillations of what he afterwards became. When paying tribute to the memory of Joan of Arc as the regenerator of France, the French should not forget another remarkable woman to whom they are indebted: Agnes Sorel employed no magic but beauty and good sense, and yet the rousing of the king to a sense of his duty was as much due to her as the rousing of the people was due to Joan. PAVIA. A.D. 476. Orestes having undertaken to dethrone Nepos, the emperor of the West, raised an army, merely showed himself, and the weak monarch abandoned the diadem. The fortunate rebel encircled the head of his son Romulus Augustulus with it. The Roman empire of the West was in its last period of decay. Odoacer, at the head of an army of Goths, Heruli, Scyrri, and Thuringians, came to give it the last blow, and to reign over its vast wreck. Terror and confusion preceded him. All fled, all dispersed at his approach. The plains were deserted, the cities opened their gates to him. Orestes, too weak to withstand him, shut himself up in Pavia. Odoacer pursued him thither, carried the city by storm, made a frightful carnage, and set fire to the churches and houses. Orestes was taken and decapitated on the 28th of August, 476, the very day on which, one year before, he had dragged Nepos from his throne. Augustulus, abandoned by everybody, stripped himself of his dangerous dignity, and delivered up the purple to his conqueror, who, out of compassion for his age, left him his life, with a pension of six thousand golden pence, that is, about three thousand three hundred pounds sterling. Thus disappeared the empire of the West, after having subsisted five hundred and six years from the battle of Actium, and twelve hundred and twenty-nine from the foundation of Rome. Scarcely was its fall perceived, scarcely a look was fixed upon its last moments; it might be compared to an old man who dies of caducity. SECOND SIEGE, A.D. 572.