We shall behold men who have hitherto laughed at the
very name of patriotism, now starving resolutely in their country's
cause; who stopped at no villainy to obtain wealth, now hesitating to
employ their ill-gotten gains in the purchase of the most important of
all gratifications--their own security and peace. Instances of the
unimaginable effect produced by the event of the siege of Rome on the
characters of her inhabitants might be drawn from all classes, from the
lowest to the highest, from patrician to plebeian; but to produce them
here would be to admit too long an interruption in the progress of the
present narrative. If we are to enter at all into detail on such a
subject, it must be only in a case clearly connected with the actual
requirements of our story; and such a case may be found, at this
juncture, in the conduct of the senator Vetranio, under the influence of
the worst calamities attending the blockade of Rome by the Goths.
Who, it may be asked, knowing the previous character of this man, his
frivolity of disposition, his voluptuous anxiety for unremitting
enjoyment and ease, his horror of the slightest approaches of affliction
or pain, would have imagined him capable of rejecting in disdain all the
minor chances of present security and future prosperity which his
unbounded power and wealth might have procured for him, even in a
famine-stricken city, and rising suddenly to the sublime of criminal
desperation, in the resolution to abandon life as worthless the moment
it had ceased to run in the easy current of all former years? Yet to
this determination had he now arrived; and, still more extraordinary, in
this determination had he found others, of his own patrician order, to
join him.
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