must recollect, that after all, we know but one side of the question.
The Romans could write; the Goths could not: they may have been able
to make out a fair case for themselves; they may have believed truly
in the guilt of Boethius; and if they did, nothing less could have
happened, by such rules of public law and justice as were then in
vogue, than did happen.

Be that as it may, the deed was done; and the punishment, if
deserved, came soon enough. Sitting at dinner (so the story runs),
the head of a fish took in Dietrich's fancy the shape of Symmachus'
head, the upper teeth biting the lip, the great eyes staring at him.
He sprang up in horror; took to his bed; and there, complaining of a
mortal chill, wrapping himself up in heaps of blankets, and bewailing
to his physician the death of his two victims, he died sadly in a few
days. And a certain holy hermit, name not given, nor date of the
vision, saw the ghosts of Boethius and Symmachus lead the Amal's soul
up the cone of Stromboli, and hurl him in, as the English sailors saw
old Boots, the Wapping usurer, hurled into the same place, for
offences far more capable of proof.

So runs the story of Dietrich's death. It is perfectly natural, and
very likely true. His contemporaries, who all believed it, saw in it
proof of his enormous guilt, and the manifest judgment of God. We
shall rather see in it a proof of the earnest, child-like, honest
nature of the man, startled into boundless horror and self-abasement,
by the sudden revelation of his crime. Truly bad men die easier
deaths than that; and go down to the grave, for the most part, blind
and self-contented, and, as they think, unpunished; and perhaps
forgiven.