dutiful. He humbly professed himself the friend of Stilicho, and the soldier of Honorius; offered his person and his troops to march, without delay, against the usurper of Gaul; and solicited, as a permanent retreat for the Gothic nation, the possession of some vacant province of the Western empire. [Footnote 100: Comitatur euntem Pallor, et atra fames; et saucia lividus ora Luctus; et inferno stridentes agmine morbi. ---Claudian in vi. Cons. Hon. 821, &c.] [Footnote 101: These dark transactions are investigated by the Count de Bual (Hist. des Peuples de l'Europe, tom. vii. c. iii.--viii. p. 69-206,) whose laborious accuracy may sometimes fatigue a superficial reader.] [Footnote 102: See Zosimus, l. v. p. 334, 335. He interrupts his scanty narrative to relate the fable of Aemona, and of the ship Argo; which was drawn overland from that place to the Adriatic. Sozomen (l. viii. c. 25, l. ix. c. 4) and Socrates (l. vii. c. 10) cast a pale and doubtful light; and Orosius (l. vii. c. 38, p. 571) is abominably partial.] The political and secret transactions of two statesmen, who labored to deceive each other and the world, must forever have been concealed in the impenetrable darkness of the cabinet, if the debates of a popular assembly had not thrown some rays of light on the correspondence of Alaric and Stilicho. The necessity of finding some artificial support for a government, which, from a principle, not of moderation, but of weakness, was reduced to negotiate with its own subjects, had insensibly revived the authority of the Roman senate; and the minister of Honorius