31,) and the xviith Annotation of Mascou.

Baronius, Pagi, and most of the Catholic doctors, confess, with an angry growl, this Gothic usurpation.] I have descanted with pleasure on the fortunate condition of Italy; but our fancy must not hastily conceive that the golden age of the poets, a race of men without vice or misery, was realized under the Gothic conquest.

The fair prospect was sometimes overcast with clouds; the wisdom of Theodoric might be deceived, his power might be resisted and the declining age of the monarch was sullied with popular hatred and patrician blood.

In the first insolence of victory, he had been tempted to deprive the whole party of Odoacer of the civil and even the natural rights of society; [83] a tax unseasonably imposed after the calamities of war, would have crushed the rising agriculture of Liguria; a rigid preemption of corn, which was intended for the public relief, must have aggravated the distress of Campania.

These dangerous projects were defeated by the virtue and eloquence of Epiphanius and Boethius, who, in the presence of Theodoric himself, successfully pleaded the cause of the people: [84] but if the royal ear was open to the voice of truth, a saint and a philosopher are not always to be found at the ear of kings.
The privileges of rank, or office, or favor, were too frequently abused by Italian fraud and Gothic violence, and the avarice of the king's nephew was publicly exposed, at first by the usurpation, and afterwards by the restitution of the estates which he had unjustly extorted from his Tuscan neighbors.