After a prosperous and brilliant reign of thirty-one years, the emperor died in the year 337, in the suburbs of Nicomedia, which Diocletian had selected as the capital of the East.  In great pomp, and amid expressions of universal grief, his body was transferred to the city he had built and called by his name; it was adorned with every symbol of grandeur and power, deposited on a golden bed, and buried in a consecrated church, which was made the sepulchre of the Greek emperors until the city was taken by the Turks.  The sacred rite of baptism by which Constantine was united with the visible Church, strange to say, was not administered until within a few days before his death.

No emperor has received more praises than Constantine.  He was fortunate in his biographers, who saw nothing to condemn in a prince who made Christianity the established religion of the Empire.  If not the greatest, he was one of the greatest, of all the absolute monarchs who controlled the destinies of over one hundred millions of subjects.  If not the best of the emperors, he was one of the best, as sovereigns are judged.  I do not see in his character any extraordinary magnanimity or elevation of sentiment, or gentleness, or warmth of affection.  He had great faults and great virtues, as strong men are apt to have.  If he was addicted to the pleasures of the table, he was chaste and continent in his marital relations.  He had no mistresses, like Julius Caesar and Louis XIV.  He had a great reverence for the ordinances of the Christian religion.  His life, in the main, was as decorous as it was useful.  He was a very successful man, but he was also a very ambitious man; and an ambitious man is apt to be unscrupulous and cruel.  Though he had to deal with bigots, he was not himself fanatical.  He was tolerant and enlightened.  His most striking characteristic was policy.  He was one of the most politic sovereigns that ever lived,—­like Henry IV. of France, forecasting the future, as well as balancing the present.  He could not have decreed such a massacre as that of Thessalonica, or have revoked such an edict as that of Nantes.  Nor could he have stooped to such a penance as Ambrose inflicted on Theodosius, or given his conscience to a Father Le Tellier.  He tried to do right, not because it was right, like Marcus Aurelius, but because it was wise and expedient; he was a Christian, because he saw that Christianity was a better religion than Paganism, not because he craved a lofty religious life; he was a theologian, after the pattern of Queen Elizabeth, because theological inquiries and disputations were the fashion of the day; but when theologians became rampant and arrogant he put them down, and dictated what they should believe.  He was comparatively indifferent to slaughter, else he would not have spent seventeen years of his life in civil war, in order to be himself supreme.  He cared little for the traditions of the Empire, else he would not have transferred his capital to the banks of the Bosporus.  He was more like Peter the Great than like Napoleon I.; yet he was a better man than either, and bestowed more benefits on the world than both together, and is to be classed among the greatest benefactors that ever sat upon the throne.