heart of a genuine convert. His ambitious reign was a perpetual violation of moral and Christian duties: his hands were stained with blood, in peace as well as in war; and, as soon as Clovis had dismissed a synod of the Gallican Church, he calmly assassinated all the princes of the Merovingian race."
47. It is too true; but rhetorically put, in the first place—for we ought to be told how many 'all' the princes were;—in the second place, we must note that, supposing Clovis had in any degree "searched the Scriptures " as presented to the Western world by St. Jerome, he was likely, as a soldier-king, to have thought more of the mission of Joshua[1] and Jehu than of the patience of Christ, whose sufferings he thought rather of avenging than imitating: and the question whether the other Kings of the Franks should either succeed him, or, in envy of his enlarged kingdom, attack and dethrone, was easily in his mind convertible
- ↑ The likeness was afterwards taken up by legend, and the walls of Angouleme, after the battle of Poitiers, are said to have fallen at the sound of the trumpets of Clovis. " A miracle," says Gibbon, "which may be reduced to the supposition that some clerical engineer had secretly undermined the foundations of the rampart." I cannot too often warn my honest readers against the modern habit of "reducing" all history whatever to ' the supposition that ' . . . etc., etc. The legend is of course the natural and easy expansion of a metaphor.
