and laboured like what he was--a royal Amal, a true son of Woden.
Unable to write, he founded a great kingdom by native virtue and
common sense. Called a barbarian, he restored prosperity to ruined
Italy, and gave to it (and with it to the greater part of the western
world), peace for three and thirty years. Brought up among hostile
sects, he laid down that golden law of religious liberty which the
nineteenth century has not yet courage and humanity enough to accept.
But if his life was heroic, his death was tragic. He failed after
all in his vast endeavours, from causes hidden from him, but visible,
and most instructive, to us; and after having toiled impartially for
the good of conquerors and of conquered alike, he died sadly, leaving
behind him a people who, most of them, believed gladly the news that
a holy hermit had seen his soul hurled down the crater of Stromboli,
as a just punishment for the inexpiable crime of being wiser than his
generation.

Some have complained of Gibbon's 'hero-worship' of Dietrich--I do
not. The honest and accurate cynic so very seldom worshipped a hero,
or believed in the existence of any, that we may take his good
opinion as almost final and without appeal. One author, for whose
opinion I have already exprest a very high respect, says that he was
but a wild man of the woods to the last; polished over skin-deep with
Roman civilization; 'Scratch him, and you found the barbarian
underneath {p101}.' It may be true. If it be true, it is a very
high compliment. It was not from his Roman civilization, but from
his 'barbarian' mother and father, that he drew the 'vive
intelligence des choses morales, et ces inspirations elevees et
heroiques,' which M. Thierry truly attributes to him. If there was,
as M. Thierry truly says, another nature struggling within him--is
there not such in every man? And are not the struggles the more