Gregory appears to have neglected no movement of the foe, to have noted every exaction and treachery from Constantinople, to have remembered every bishop in the furthest-off regions, and to have directed to each in turn his expostulations, his entreaties, his reproofs. We have been told in our own day of the overwhelming weight of business (attributed to facilities of post and daily communications) which almost crushes an English archbishop, although that dignitary besides the care of the Church has but such an amount of concern in public matters as a conscientious adviser must have. But Gregory was responsible for everything, the lives and so far as was possible the liberties of his city and people, their daily bread, their safety, their very existence, besides that cure of souls which was his special occupation. The mass of correspondence, which beside all his other work he managed to get through, forgetting nothing, is enough to put any modern writer of hasty notes and curt business letters to shame. On this point there may be said a word of apology for the much-harassed Pope in respect to that one moment in his history, in which his conduct cannot be defended by his warmest admirer. His prayers and appeals were treated with contempt at Constantinople, a contempt involving not his own person alone, but Rome and the Church, for which the Emperor Maurice did not even pretend to care. And when that Emperor was suddenly swept away, it is natural enough that a sensation of relief, a touch of hope in the new man who, notwithstanding the treachery and cruelty of the first step in his career, might turn out better than his predecessor, should have gleamed across the mind of a distant, and perhaps at first imperfectly informed spectator, whose interests were so closely concerned. The complacency with which Gregory wrote to Phocas, the amazing terms he used to that murderer and tyrant, will always be the darkest stain on his reputation. Under Maurice the ministers of the empire had been more oppressive than the invaders. Perhaps under Phocas better things might be hoped for. It is all that can be said for this unfortunate moment of his career; but it is something nevertheless.