The delirium of his imagination had transported him to the temple at
Alexandria; the days were revived when his glory had risen to its
culminating point, when the Christians trembled before him as their
fiercest enemy, and the Pagans surrounded him as their last hope. The
victims of his former and forgotten treachery were but as two among the
throng of votaries allured by the fame of his eloquence, by the
triumphant notoriety of his power to protect the adherents of the
ancient creed.
But it was not always thus that his madness declared itself: there were
moments when it rose to appalling frenzy. Then he imagined himself to
be again hurling the Christian assailants from the topmost walls of the
besieged temple, in that past time when the image of Serapis was doomed
by the Bishop of Alexandria to be destroyed. His yells of fury, his
frantic execrations of defiance were heard afar, in the solemn silence
of pestilence-stricken Rome. Those who, during the most fatal days of
the Gothic blockade, dropped famished on the pavement before the little
temple, as they endeavoured to pass it on their onward way, presented a
dread reality of death, to embody the madman's visions of battle and
slaughter.
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