Morality is, after all, like criticism, only a matter of existing convention and national temperament. Believe the right thing, and one's vices are a matter of small account. In the mediæval times, with a proper amount of faith, one might with impunity, boil one's enemies or roast them before a fire, and be duly canonised and offered to posterity as a saint and a just man. But be as virtuous and as austere as Marcus Aurelius, believing the wrong thing, and the orthodox historian will manage to be blind to your virtues, and offer you for public contumely. So we have a legend of sanctity centred round this extremely unedifying prince, who took up arms against a father not convicted of any particular injustice or enormity, plotted with France to dethrone him, and after an unnatural career, died furious and unresigned, breathing curses upon his enemies. Behold him one of the glories of that curious medley of Pagan qualities and unchristian vices, Mediæval Catholicism. The historians will not even permit the poor father to grieve and regret his own harshness in peace. His sorrow and remorse are not accepted as the natural sentiments of a man whom a just anger had carried beyond the endurance of nature. We are forced to regard them as the tardy recognition of his own iniquity and error. We are told in triumph that the monarch died weeping and repentant in the arms of St Leander of Seville, the friend and uncle by marriage of his exiled son. Could anything be more natural than this touching and piteous picture of an old man, doubtful of himself, turning in his grief to the one great friend of his son? The action in its simple humanity is worth all the grandiloquent insolence of the saint and martyr Leovigildo mourned, in whose story virtue and sanctity are equally unevident.