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 father, he wrote a beautiful hand, which last accomplishment procured him the surname of Kalligraphos—the fair writer. He applied it especially to the illumination of manuscripts. Cut off from the world, he acquired a positive distaste for anything like business, and he signed papers without reading them, thereby often getting credit for harshness and injustice. He was the one last man in the world with whose name we should have expected an important code of legislation would have been associated. The so-called Theodosian Code, which marks his reign, was the fruit of an intelligent reforming spirit now beginning to make itself distinctly felt.

It was the good fortune of the young prince to have also the counsels and guidance of a good minister. The time, as we have said, was a perplexing one, and now the empire was menaced by a host of Huns who had penetrated far into Thrace. Their chief, Uldin, boasted that he would lead them on to the rising sun, but his vaunt soon ended in his having to retire, and even recross the Danube. The prime minister, as we may call him, Anthemius, took prompt measures, which were really the means of saving the empire in the East. On the frontiers of Illyria and Upper Moesia—in what is now Servia—he established fortresses; but his chief and most valuable work was to strengthen Constantinople itself by building, in the year 413, the great walls, as they have been called. These were such as effectually to defy the most furious assaults of mere barbarians.

The young emperor's marriage was the most singular passage of his reign. There is an air of romance about