he will revenge his own degradation on that court and empire which he
knows well enough to despise, distrust and hate. Again and again the
spell comes over him. His vanity and his passions make him once more
a courtier among the Greeks; but the blood of Odin is strong within
him still; again and again he rises, with a noble shame, to virtue
and patriotism, trampling under foot selfish luxury and glory, till
the victory is complete; and he turns away in the very moment of the
greatest temptation, from the bewitching city, to wander, fight,
starve, and at last conquer a new land for himself and for his
nation; and shew, by thirty years of justice and wisdom, what that
true Dietrich was, which had been so long overlaid by the false
Dietrich of his sinful youth.

Look at the facts of his history, as they stand, and see whether they
do not bear out this, and no other, theory of his character.

The year was 455, two years after Attila's death. Near Vienna a boy
was born, of Theodemir one of the Gothic kings and his favourite
Erleva. He was sent when eight years old to Constantinople as a
hostage. The Emperor Leo had agreed to pay the Goths 300 pounds of
gold every year, if they would but leave him in peace; and young
Dietrich was the pledge of the compact. There he grew up amid all
the wisdom of the Romans, watching it all, and yet never even
learning to write. It seems to some that the German did not care to
learn; it seems to me rather that they did not care to teach. He
came back to his people at eighteen, delighted them by his strength
and stature, and became, to all appearance, a Goth of the Goths;
going adventures with six thousand volunteers against the Sarmatae,
who had just defeated the Greeks, and taken a city--which he retook,
but instead of restoring it to the Emperor, kept himself. Food