alternative, within the year, of professing the Christian faith, and accepting baptism, or being publicly flogged a hundred whip-strokes, shaven and shorn, robbed of their goods, and expelled from the kingdom. One hardly understands why the shaving and flogging should have been ordered, since appropriation and expulsion ought to have sufficed. Even the Fathers of the Church had the grace to protest against the needless inhumanity of this edict, though the Toledan bishops in a council upheld it. Yet history accepts him as a mild and upright judge, a magnificent prince, a valiant and humane captain, the friend of the poor, the protector of letters. He himself dabbled in literature, wrote in the swollen and exaggerated Gothic manner, composed several earnest and dogmatic letters in refutation of Arianism, which he addressed to the King and Queen of Lombardy, severely reprimanded Bishop Eusebius for the disorders of his existence, and commanded Bishop Caecilius to return to his diocese, which he had forsaken for the monastery. Clearly a monarch not to be trifled with even by the bishops, whom he kept in check, and whose public and private life he insisted on regulating. He conquered the Asturians and the Vascons, and overthrew the Byzantine power in Spain, seizing most of the Imperial towns and weakening the Imperial forces at Cadiz. At home he built the church of St Leocadia. But of the growth of the town we learn little. Literature in those days was more moral than descriptive, and the Gothic kings of Toledo, when not fighting the Byzantines and Vascons, seem chiefly to have been engaged in discovering elegant flowers of speech, and cultivating the very finest obscurity of expression. Suinthila, looking from the seven rocky hills of his martial town, could tell himself that the kings of Toledo ruled from Cadiz to the Pyrenees, from Atlantic to Mediterranean shores, while Chindasvinthe, in his semi-Roman palace, looked peacefully across the vega and along those foliaged banks of the quiet Tagus that had beguiled Pyrrhus and his mate from the East, and recreated himself with the art of letters. St Eugenius and St Braulion of Zaragoza were the honoured recipients of his royal epistles, in which he writes of "an eloquence adorned with the most flowery words and girdled with all the harmonies of fine language," and plunging further into unlucid intricacies hymns an "eloquence suggesting a royal clemency, an observation wherein shines the zeal displayed in the travail of literary composition." When he led his troops to battle, it is to be hoped that his military addresses to them revealed less fearfully the travail of literary composition. Surely the harmonies of fine language so admired by him were never more inappropriately "girdled" against the encroachments of ordinary sense. He speaks of someone "who will not succumb from a need of understanding" and "who is not meagre through poverty of spirit." His successor, Recesvinthus, displayed the same