months. His innocence was at length acknowledged, but the course of the old soldier was run. It was not he, as has often been explained, but another and a later general, who in his old age was blinded and set before the imperial palace with a plate in his hand to ask alms.
Justinian died at the advanced age of eighty-three. He was not a great emperor, but he had the sagacity to select the best officers. He was a prodigy of industry; in an age of curiously active intellectual energy, he was philosopher, poet, musician, architect, lawyer, and theologian.
It was in all a most remarkable and illustrious reign—one in which many great questions seemed settled decisively, though none were. Vandals, Goths, Persians, Bulgarians, all were driven back before the "Roman" arms, and nature herself added phenomena to mark the epoch. Comets blazed in the sky, an omen of disaster to some. One earthquake swallowed up a quarter of a million of people at Antioch; another destroyed Beyrout; a third filled up the harbour of Botrys; a fourth was felt in Constantinople for forty days incessantly. War, earthquakes, famine the follower of war—were not these scourges enough for the human race? Yet there was pestilence as well. The spotted typhus, the real plague of the East, that described by Thucydides and Defoe, fell upon the Eastern world. Who can tell how many perished? As in the black plague of Edward III., thousands died daily, but no one counted their number; cities were cleared of their inhabitants, who either fled or died of the disease; harvests were left standing; the
