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Rienzi, the Last of the Roman Tribunes

by Baron Edward Bulwer Lytton Lytton · English · Gutenberg #1396 · 1,072,729 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Rienzi, the Last of the Roman Tribunes

Author: Baron Edward Bulwer Lytton Lytton


        
Release date: February 15, 2006 [eBook #1396]
                Most recently updated: October 29, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK RIENZI, THE LAST OF THE ROMAN TRIBUNES ***

RIENZI,

The Last of the Roman Tribunes


by

Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton, Bart.

     Then turn we to her latest Tribune’s name,
     From her ten thousand tyrants turn to thee,
     Redeemer of dark centuries of shame--
     The friend of Petrarch--hope of Italy--
     Rienzi, last of Romans!  While the tree
     Of Freedom’s wither’d trunk puts forth a leaf,
     Even for thy tomb a garland let it be--
     The Forum’s champion, and the People’s chief--
     Her new-born Numa thou!

     Childe Harold, cant. iv. stanza 114.


     Amidst the indulgence of enthusiasm and eloquence, Petrarch,
     Italy, and Europe, were astonished by a revolution, which
     realized for a moment his most splendid visions.--Gibbon,
     chap. 1xx.


Dedication of Rienzi.

To Alessandro Manzoni, as to the Genius of the Place,

Are Dedicated These Fruits, gathered on The Soil of Italian Fiction.

London, Dec. 1, 1835.



Dedication,

Prefixed to the First Collected Edition of the Author’s Works in 1840.

My Dear Mother,

In inscribing with your beloved and honoured name this Collection of my
Works, I could wish that the fruits of my manhood were worthier of the
tender and anxious pains bestowed upon my education in youth.

Left yet young, and with no ordinary accomplishments and gifts, the sole
guardian of your sons, to them you devoted the best years of your useful
and spotless life; and any success it be their fate to attain in the
paths they have severally chosen, would have its principal sweetness
in the thought that such success was the reward of one whose hand aided
every struggle, and whose heart sympathized in every care.

From your graceful and accomplished taste, I early learned that
affection for literature which has exercised so large an influence
over the pursuits of my life; and you who were my first guide, were my
earliest critic. Do you remember the summer days, which seemed to me
so short, when you repeated to me those old ballads with which Percy
revived the decaying spirit of our national muse, or the smooth couplets
of Pope, or those gentle and polished verses with the composition of
which you had beguiled your own earlier leisure? It was those easy
lessons, far more than the harsher rudiments learned subsequently
in schools, that taught me to admire and to imitate; and in them I
recognise the germ of the flowers, however perishable they be, that I
now bind up and lay upon a shrine hallowed by a thousand memories of
unspeakable affection. Happy, while I borrowed from your taste, could I
have found it not more difficult to imitate your virtues--your spirit of
active and extended benevolence, your cheerful piety, your considerate
justice, your kindly charity--and all the qualities that brighten a
nature more free from the thought of self, than any it has been my lot
to meet with. Never more than at this moment did I wish that my writings
were possessed of a merit which might outlive my time, so that at least
these lines might remain a record of the excellence of the Mother, and
the gratitude of the Son.

E.L.B. London: January 6, 1840.



Preface

to

The First Edition of Rienzi.

I began this tale two years ago at Rome. On removing to Naples, I
threw it aside for “The Last Days of Pompeii,” which required more
than “Rienzi” the advantage of residence within reach of the scenes
described. The fate of the Roman Tribune continued, however, to haunt
and impress me, and, some time after “Pompeii” was published, I renewed
my earlier undertaking. I regarded the completion of these volumes,
indeed, as a kind of duty;--for having had occasion to read the original
authorities from which modern historians have drawn their accounts of
the life of Rienzi, I was led to believe that a very remarkable man had
been superficially judged, and a very important period crudely examined.
(See Appendix, Nos. I and II.) And this belief was sufficiently strong
to induce me at first to meditate a more serious work upon the life and
times of Rienzi. (I have adopted the termination of Rienzi instead of
Rienzo, as being more familiar to the general reader.--But the latter
is perhaps the more accurate reading, since the name was a popular
corruption from Lorenzo.) Various reasons concurred against this
project--and I renounced the biography to commence the fiction. I have
still, however, adhered, with a greater fidelity than is customary
in Romance, to all the leading events of the public life of the Roman
Tribune; and the Reader will perhaps find in these pages a more full
and detailed account of the rise and fall of Rienzi, than in any English
work of which I am aware. I have, it is true, taken a view of his
character different in some respects from that of Gibbon or Sismondi.
But it is a view, in all its main features, which I believe (and think I
could prove) myself to be warranted in taking, not less by the facts of
History than the laws of Fiction. In the meanwhile, as I have given the
facts from which I have drawn my interpretation of the principal agent,
the reader has sufficient data for his own judgment. In the picture of
the Roman Populace, as in that of the Roman Nobles of the fourteenth
century, I follow literally the descriptions left to us;--they are not
flattering, but they are faithful, likenesses.

Preserving generally the real chronology of Rienzi’s life, the plot of
this work extends over a space of some years, and embraces the variety
of characters necessary to a true delineation of events. The story,
therefore, cannot have precisely that order of interest found in
fictions strictly and genuinely dramatic, in which (to my judgment at
least) the time ought to be as limited as possible, and the characters
as few;--no new character of importance to the catastrophe being
admissible towards the end of the work. If I may use the word Epic in
its most modest and unassuming acceptation, this Fiction, in short,
though indulging in dramatic situations, belongs, as a whole, rather to
the Epic than the Dramatic school.

I cannot conclude without rendering the tribute of my praise and homage
to the versatile and gifted Author of the beautiful Tragedy of Rienzi.
Considering that our hero be the same--considering that we had the same
materials from which to choose our several stories--I trust I shall
be found to have little, if at all, trespassed upon ground previously
occupied. With the single exception of a love-intrigue between a
relative of Rienzi and one of the antagonist party, which makes the
plot of Miss Mitford’s Tragedy, and is little more than an episode in my
Romance, having slight effect on the conduct and none on the fate of the
hero, I am not aware of any resemblance between the two works; and even
this coincidence I could easily have removed, had I deemed it the least
advisable:--but it would be almost discreditable if I had nothing that
resembled a performance possessing so much it were an honour to imitate.

In fact, the prodigal materials of the story--the rich and exuberant
complexities of Rienzi’s character--joined to the advantage possessed by
the Novelist of embracing all that the Dramatist must reject (Thus the
slender space permitted to the Dramatist does not allow Miss Mitford to
be very faithful to facts; to distinguish between Rienzi’s earlier and
his later period of power; or to detail the true, but somewhat intricate
causes of his rise, his splendour, and his fall.)--are sufficient to
prevent Dramatist and Novelist from interfering with each other.

London, December 1, 1835.


Preface to the Present Edition, 1848.

From the time of its first appearance, “Rienzi” has had the good fortune
to rank high amongst my most popular works--though its interest is
rather drawn from a faithful narration of historical facts, than from
the inventions of fancy. And the success of this experiment confirms me
in my belief, that the true mode of employing history in the service
of romance, is to study diligently the materials as history; conform to
such views of the facts as the Author would adopt, if he related them
in the dry character of historian; and obtain that warmer interest which
fiction bestows, by tracing the causes of the facts in the characters
and emotions of the personages of the time. The events of his work are
thus already shaped to his hand--the characters already created--what
remains for him, is the inner, not outer, history of man--the chronicle
of the human heart; and it is by this that he introduces a new harmony
between character and event, and adds the completer solution of what is
actual and true, by those speculations of what is natural and probable,
which are out of the province of history, but belong especially to the
philosophy of romance. And--if it be permitted the tale-teller to come
reverently for instruction in his art to the mightiest teacher of all,
who, whether in the page or on the scene, would give to airy fancies the
breath and the form of life,--such, we may observe, is the lesson the
humblest craftsman in historical romance may glean from the Historical
Plays of Shakespeare. Necessarily, Shakespeare consulted history
according to the imperfect lights, and from the popular authorities, of
his age; and I do not say, therefore, that as an historian we can rely
upon Shakespeare as correct. But to that in which he believed he rigidly
adhered; nor did he seek, as lesser artists (such as Victor Hugo and his
disciples) seek now, to turn perforce the Historical into the Poetical,
but leaving history as he found it, to call forth from its arid prose
the flower of the latent poem. Nay, even in the more imaginative plays
which he has founded upon novels and legends popular in his time, it is
curious and instructive to see how little he has altered the original
ground-work--taking for granted the main materials of the story, and
reserving all his matchless resources of wisdom and invention, to
illustrate from mental analysis, the creations whose outline he was
content to borrow. He receives, as a literal fact not to be altered,
the somewhat incredible assertion of the novelist, that the pure and
delicate and highborn Venetian loves the swarthy Moor--and that Romeo
fresh from his “woes for Rosaline,” becomes suddenly enamoured of
Juliet: He found the Improbable, and employed his art to make it
truthful.

That “Rienzi” should have attracted peculiar attention in Italy, is of
course to be attributed to the choice of the subject rather than to the
skill of the Author. It has been translated into the Italian language by
eminent writers; and the authorities for the new view of Rienzi’s times
and character which the Author deemed himself warranted to take, have
been compared with his text by careful critics and illustrious scholars,
in those states in which the work has been permitted to circulate. (In
the Papal States, I believe, it was neither, prudently nor effectually,
proscribed.) I may say, I trust without unworthy pride, that the result
has confirmed the accuracy of delineations which English readers relying
only on the brilliant but disparaging account in Gibbon deemed too
favourable; and has tended to restore the great Tribune to his long
forgotten claims to the love and reverence of the Italian land. Nor, if
I may trust to the assurances that have reached me from many now engaged
in the aim of political regeneration, has the effect of that revival of
the honours due to a national hero, leading to the ennobling study
of great examples, been wholly without its influence upon the rising
generation of Italian youth, and thereby upon those stirring events
which have recently drawn the eyes of Europe to the men and the lands
beyond the Alps.

In preparing for the Press this edition of a work illustrative of the
exertions of a Roman, in advance of his time, for the political freedom
of his country, and of those struggles between contending principles,
of which Italy was the most stirring field in the Middle Ages, it is not
out of place or season to add a few sober words, whether as a student of
the Italian Past, or as an observer, with some experience of the social
elements of Italy as it now exists, upon the state of affairs in that
country.

It is nothing new to see the Papal Church in the capacity of a popular
reformer, and in contra-position to the despotic potentates of the
several states, as well as to the German Emperor, who nominally inherits
the sceptre of the Caesars. Such was its common character under its more
illustrious Pontiffs; and the old Republics of Italy grew up under the
shadow of the Papal throne, harbouring ever two factions--the one for
the Emperor, the one for the Pope--the latter the more naturally
allied to Italian independence. On the modern stage, we almost see the
repetition of many an ancient drama. But the past should teach us to
doubt the continuous and stedfast progress of any single line of policy
under a principality so constituted as that of the Papal Church--a
principality in which no race can be perpetuated, in which no objects
can be permanent; in which the successor is chosen by a select
ecclesiastical synod, under a variety of foreign as well as of national
influences; in which the chief usually ascends the throne at an age
that ill adapts his mind to the idea of human progress, and the active
direction of mundane affairs;--a principality in which the peculiar
sanctity that wraps the person of the Sovereign exonerates him from
the healthful liabilities of a power purely temporal, and directly
accountable to Man. A reforming Pope is a lucky accident, and dull
indeed must be the brain which believes in the possibility of a long
succession of reforming Popes, or which can regard as other than
precarious and unstable the discordant combination of a constitutional
government with an infallible head.

It is as true as it is trite that political freedom is not the growth of
a day--it is not a flower without a stalk, and it must gradually develop
itself from amidst the unfolding leaves of kindred institutions.

In one respect, the Austrian domination, fairly considered, has been
beneficial to the States over which it has been directly exercised, and
may be even said to have unconsciously schooled them to the capacity for
freedom. In those States the personal rights which depend on impartial
and incorrupt administration of the law, are infinitely more secure than
in most of the Courts of Italy. Bribery, which shamefully predominates
in the judicature of certain Principalities, is as unknown in the
juridical courts of Austrian Italy as in England. The Emperor himself is
often involved in legal disputes with a subject, and justice is as
free and as firm for the humblest suitor, as if his antagonist were his
equal. Austria, indeed, but holds together the motley and inharmonious
members of its vast domain on either side the Alps, by a general
character of paternal mildness and forbearance in all that great
circle of good government which lies without the one principle of
constitutional liberty. It asks but of its subjects to submit to be well
governed--without agitating the question “how and by what means that
government is carried on.” For every man, except the politician, the
innovator, Austria is no harsh stepmother. But it is obviously clear
that the better in other respects the administration of a state it does
but foster the more the desire for that political security, which is
only found in constitutional freedom: the reverence paid to personal
rights, but begets the passion for political; and under a mild despotism
are already half matured the germs of a popular constitution. But it is
still a grave question whether Italy is ripe for self-government--and
whether, were it possible that the Austrian domination could be shaken
off--the very passions so excited, the very bloodshed so poured forth,
would not ultimately place the larger portion of Italy under auspices
less favourable to the sure growth of freedom, than those which silently
brighten under the sway of the German Caesar.

The two kingdoms, at the opposite extremes of Italy, to which
circumstance and nature seem to assign the main ascendancy, are Naples
and Sardinia. Looking to the former, it is impossible to discover on
the face of the earth a country more adapted for commercial prosperity.
Nature formed it as the garden of Europe, and the mart of the
Mediterranean. Its soil and climate could unite the products of the East
with those of the Western hemisphere. The rich island of Sicily should
be the great corn granary of the modern nations as it was of the
ancient; the figs, the olives, the oranges, of both the Sicilies, under
skilful cultivation, should equal the produce of Spain and the Orient,
and the harbours of the kingdom (the keys to three-quarters of the
globe) should be crowded with the sails and busy with the life of
commerce. But, in the character of its population, Naples has been
invariably in the rear of Italian progress; it caught but partial
inspiration from the free Republics, or even the wise Tyrannies, of the
Middle Ages; the theatre of frequent revolutions without fruit; and
all rational enthusiasm created by that insurrection, which has lately
bestowed on Naples the boon of a representative system, cannot but be
tempered by the conviction that of all the States in Italy, this is the
one which least warrants the belief of permanence to political freedom,
or of capacity to retain with vigour what may be seized by passion. (If
the Electoral Chamber in the new Neapolitan Constitution, give a
fair share of members to the Island of Sicily, it will be rich in
the inevitable elements of discord, and nothing save a wisdom and
moderation, which cannot soberly be anticipated, can prevent the
ultimate separation of the island from the dominion of Naples. Nature
has set the ocean between the two countries--but differences in
character, and degree and quality of civilisation--national jealousies,
historical memories, have trebled the space of the seas that roll
between them.--More easy to unite under one free Parliament, Spain
with Flanders; or re-annex to England its old domains of Aquitaine
and Normandy--than to unite in one Council Chamber truly popular, the
passions, interests, and prejudices of Sicily and Naples.--Time will
show.)

Far otherwise is it, with Sardinia. Many years since, the writer of
these pages ventured to predict that the time must come when Sardinia
would lead the van of Italian civilisation, and take proud place amongst
the greater nations of Europe. In the great portion of this population
there is visible the new blood of a young race; it is not, as with other
Italian States, a worn-out stock; you do not see there a people
fallen, proud of the past, and lazy amidst ruins, but a people rising,
practical, industrious, active; there, in a word, is an eager youth to
be formed to mature development, not a decrepit age to be restored to
bloom and muscle. Progress is the great characteristic of the Sardinian
state. Leave it for five years; visit it again, and you behold
improvement. When you enter the kingdom and find, by the very skirts of
its admirable roads, a raised footpath for the passengers and travellers
from town to town, you become suddenly aware that you are in a land
where close attention to the humbler classes is within the duties of
a government. As you pass on from the more purely Italian part of
the population,--from the Genoese country into that of Piedmont,--the
difference between a new people and an old, on which I have dwelt,
becomes visible in the improved cultivation of the soil, the better
habitations of the labourer, the neater aspect of the towns, the greater
activity in the thoroughfares. To the extraordinary virtues of the
King, as King, justice is scarcely done, whether in England or abroad.
Certainly, despite his recent concessions, Charles Albert is not and
cannot be at heart, much of a constitutional reformer; and his strong
religious tendencies, which, perhaps unjustly, have procured him in
philosophical quarters the character of a bigot, may link him more than
his political, with the cause of the Father of his Church. But he is
nobly and preeminently national, careful of the prosperity and jealous
of the honour of his own state, while conscientiously desirous of the
independence of Italy. His attention to business, is indefatigable.
Nothing escapes his vigilance. Over all departments of the kingdom is
the eye of a man ever anxious to improve. Already the silk manufactures
of Sardinia almost rival those of Lyons: in their own departments the
tradesmen of Turin exhibit an artistic elegance and elaborate finish,
scarcely exceeded in the wares of London and Paris. The King’s internal
regulations are admirable; his laws, administered with the most
impartial justice--his forts and defences are in that order, without
which, at least on the Continent, no land is safe--his army is the most
perfect in Italy. His wise genius extends itself to the elegant as to
the useful arts--an encouragement that shames England, and even France,
is bestowed upon the School for Painters, which has become one of the
ornaments of his illustrious reign. The character of the main part of
the population, and the geographical position of his country, assist the
monarch and must force on himself, or his successors, in the career
of improvement so signally begun. In the character of the people, the
vigour of the Northman ennobles the ardour and fancy of the West. In
the position of the country, the public mind is brought into constant
communication with the new ideas in the free lands of Europe.
Civilisation sets in direct currents towards the streets and marts of
Turin. Whatever the result of the present crisis in Italy, no power
and no chance which statesmen can predict, can preclude Sardinia from
ultimately heading all that is best in Italy. The King may improve his
present position, or peculiar prejudices, inseparable perhaps from the
heritage of absolute monarchy, and which the raw and rude councils of
an Electoral Chamber, newly called into life, must often irritate and
alarm, may check his own progress towards the master throne of the
Ausonian land. But the people themselves, sooner or later, will do the
work of the King. And in now looking round Italy for a race worthy of
Rienzi, and able to accomplish his proud dreams, I see but one for which
the time is ripe or ripening, and I place the hopes of Italy in the men
of Piedmont and Sardinia.

London, February 14, 1848.




RIENZI, The Last of the Tribunes.




BOOK I. -- THE TIME, THE PLACE, AND THE MEN.

“_Fu da sua gioventudine nutricato di latte di eloquenza; buono
grammatico, megliore rettorico, autorista buono...Oh, come spesso
diceva, ‘Dove sono questi buoni Romani? Dov’e loro somma giustizia?
Poterommi trovare in tempo che questi fioriscano?’ Era bell
‘omo...Accadde che uno suo frate fu ucciso, e non ne fu fatta vendetta
di sua morte: non lo poteo aiutare; pensa lungo mano vendicare ‘l
sangue di suo frate; pensa lunga mano dirizzare la cittate di Roma male
guidata_.”--“Vita di Cola di Rienzi” Ed. 1828. Forli.

“From his youth he was nourished with the milk of eloquence; a good
grammarian, a better rhetorician, well versed in the writings of
authors...Oh, how often would he say, ‘Where are those good Romans?
Where is their supreme justice? Shall I ever behold such times as those
in which they flourished?’ He was a handsome man...It happened that a
brother of his was slain, and no retribution was made for his death:
he could not help him; long did he ponder how to avenge his brother’s
blood; long did he ponder how to direct the ill guided state of
Rome.”--“Life of Cola di Rienzi.”



Chapter 1.I. The Brothers.

The celebrated name which forms the title to this work will sufficiently
apprise the reader that it is in the earlier half of the fourteenth
century that my story opens.

It was on a summer evening that two youths might be seen walking beside
the banks of the Tiber, not far from that part of its winding course
which sweeps by the base of Mount Aventine. The path they had selected
was remote and tranquil. It was only at a distance that were seen the
scattered and squalid houses that bordered the river, from amidst which
rose, dark and frequent, the high roof and enormous towers which marked
the fortified mansion of some Roman baron. On one side of the river,
behind the cottages of the fishermen, soared Mount Janiculum, dark with
massive foliage, from which gleamed at frequent intervals, the grey
walls of many a castellated palace, and the spires and columns of a
hundred churches; on the other side, the deserted Aventine rose abrupt
and steep, covered with thick brushwood; while, on the height, from
concealed but numerous convents, rolled, not unmusically, along the
quiet landscape and the rippling waves, the sound of the holy bell.

Of the young men introduced in this scene, the elder, who might have
somewhat passed his twentieth year, was of a tall and even commanding
stature; and there was that in his presence remarkable and almost noble,
despite the homeliness of his garb, which consisted of the long, loose
gown and the plain tunic, both of dark-grey serge, which distinguished,
at that time, the dress of the humbler scholars who frequented the
monasteries for such rude knowledge as then yielded a scanty return for
intense toil. His countenance was handsome, and would have been rather
gay than thoughtful in its expression, but for that vague and abstracted
dreaminess of eye which so usually denotes a propensity to revery and
contemplation, and betrays that the past or the future is more congenial
to the mind than the enjoyment and action of the present hour.

The younger, who was yet a boy, had nothing striking in his appearance
or countenance, unless an expression of great sweetness and gentleness
could be so called; and there was something almost feminine in the
tender deference with which he appeared to listen to his companion.
His dress was that usually worn by the humbler classes, though somewhat
neater, perhaps, and newer; and the fond vanity of a mother might be
detected in the care with which the long and silky ringlets had been
smoothed and parted as they escaped from his cap and flowed midway down
his shoulders.

As they thus sauntered on, beside the whispering reeds of the river,
each with his arm round the form of his comrade, there was a grace
in the bearing, in the youth, and in the evident affection of the
brothers--for such their connexion--which elevated the lowliness of
their apparent condition.

“Dear brother,” said the elder, “I cannot express to thee how I enjoy
these evening hours. To you alone I feel as if I were not a mere
visionary and idler when I talk of the uncertain future, and build up my
palaces of the air. Our parents listen to me as if I were uttering fine
things out of a book; and my dear mother, Heaven bless her! wipes her
eyes, and says, ‘Hark, what a scholar he is!’ As for the monks, if I
ever dare look from my Livy, and cry ‘Thus should Rome be again!’ they
stare, and gape, and frown, as though I had broached an heresy. But you,
sweet brother, though you share not my studies, sympathize so kindly
with all their results--you seem so to approve my wild schemes, and to
encourage my ambitious hopes--that sometimes I forget our birth, our
fortunes, and think and dare as if no blood save that of the Teuton
Emperor flowed through our veins.”

“Methinks, dear Cola,” said the younger brother, “that Nature played us
an unfair trick--to you she transmitted the royal soul, derived from
our father’s parentage; and to me only the quiet and lowly spirit of my
mother’s humble lineage.”

“Nay,” answered Cola, quickly, “you would then have the brighter
share,--for I should have but the Barbarian origin, and you the Roman.
Time was, when to be a simple Roman was to be nobler than a northern
king.--Well, well, we may live to see great changes!”

“I shall live to see thee a great man, and that will content me,” said
the younger, smiling affectionately; “a great scholar all confess you
to be already: our mother predicts your fortunes every time she hears of
your welcome visits to the Colonna.”

“The Colonna!” said Cola, with a bitter smile; “the Colonna--the
pedants!--They affect, dull souls, the knowledge of the past, play the
patron, and misquote Latin over their cups! They are pleased to welcome
me at their board, because the Roman doctors call me learned, and
because Nature gave me a wild wit, which to them is pleasanter than the
stale jests of a hired buffoon. Yes, they would advance my fortunes--but
how? by some place in the public offices, which would fill a dishonoured
coffer, by wringing, yet more sternly, the hard-earned coins from our
famishing citizens! If there be a vile thing in the world, it is a
plebeian, advanced by patricians, not for the purpose of righting his
own order, but for playing the pander to the worst interests of theirs.
He who is of the people but makes himself a traitor to his birth, if he
furnishes the excuse for these tyrant hypocrites to lift up their hands
and cry--‘See what liberty exists in Rome, when we, the patricians, thus
elevate a plebeian!’ Did they ever elevate a plebeian if he sympathized
with plebeians? No, brother; should I be lifted above our condition, I
will be raised by the arms of my countrymen, and not upon their necks.”

“All I hope, is, Cola, that you will not, in your zeal for your
fellow-citizens, forget how dear you are to us. No greatness could ever
reconcile me to the thought that it brought you danger.”

“And I could laugh at all danger, if it led to greatness. But
greatness--greatness! Vain dream! Let us keep it for our night sleep.
Enough of my plans; now, dearest brother, of yours.”

And, with the sanguine and cheerful elasticity which belonged to him,
the young Cola, dismissing all wilder thoughts, bent his mind to listen,
and to enter into, the humbler projects of his brother. The new boat and
the holiday dress, and the cot removed to a quarter more secure from the
oppression of the barons, and such distant pictures of love as a dark
eye and a merry lip conjure up to the vague sentiments of a boy;--to
schemes and aspirations of which such objects made the limit, did the
scholar listen, with a relaxed brow and a tender smile; and often, in
later life, did that conversation occur to him, when he shrank from
asking his own heart which ambition was the wiser.

“And then,” continued the younger brother, “by degrees I might save
enough to purchase such a vessel as that which we now see, laden,
doubtless, with corn and merchandise, bringing--oh, such a good
return--that I could fill your room with books, and never hear you
complain that you were not rich enough to purchase some crumbling old
monkish manuscript. Ah, that would make me so happy!” Cola smiled as he
pressed his brother closer to his breast.

“Dear boy,” said he, “may it rather be mine to provide for your wishes!
Yet methinks the masters of yon vessel have no enviable possession,
see how anxiously the men look round, and behind, and before: peaceful
traders though they be, they fear, it seems, even in this city (once the
emporium of the civilised world), some pirate in pursuit; and ere the
voyage be over, they may find that pirate in a Roman noble. Alas, to
what are we reduced!”

The vessel thus referred to was speeding rapidly down the river, and
some three or four armed men on deck were indeed intently surveying the
quiet banks on either side, as if anticipating a foe. The bark soon,
however, glided out of sight, and the brothers fell back upon those
themes which require only the future for a text to become attractive to
the young.

At length, as the evening darkened, they remembered that it was past the
usual hour in which they returned home, and they began to retrace their
steps.

“Stay,” said Cola, abruptly, “how our talk has beguiled me! Father
Uberto promised me a rare manuscript, which the good friar confesses
hath puzzled the whole convent. I was to seek his cell for it this
evening. Tarry here a few minutes, it is but half-way up the Aventine. I
shall soon return.”

“Can I not accompany you?”

“Nay,” returned Cola, with considerate kindness, “you have borne toil
all the day, and must be wearied; my labours of the body, at least, have
been light enough. You are delicate, too, and seem fatigued already; the
rest will refresh you. I shall not be long.”

The boy acquiesced, though he rather wished to accompany his brother;
but he was of a meek and yielding temper, and seldom resisted the
lightest command of those he loved. He sat him down on a little bank by
the river-side, and the firm step and towering form of his brother were
soon hid from his gaze by the thick and melancholy foliage.

At first he sat very quietly, enjoying the cool air, and thinking over
all the stories of ancient Rome that his brother had told him in their
walk. At length he recollected that his little sister, Irene, had begged
him to bring her home some flowers; and, gathering such as he could find
at hand (and many a flower grew, wild and clustering, over that desolate
spot), he again seated himself, and began weaving them into one of those
garlands for which the southern peasantry still retain their ancient
affection, and something of their classic skill.

While the boy was thus engaged, the tramp of horses and the loud
shouting of men were heard at a distance. They came near, and nearer.

“Some baron’s procession, perhaps, returning from a feast,” thought the
boy. “It will be a pretty sight--their white plumes and scarlet mantles!
I love to see such sights, but I will just move out of their way.”

So, still mechanically platting his garland, but with eyes turned
towards the quarter of the expected procession, the young Roman moved
yet nearer towards the river.

Presently the train came in view,--a gallant company, in truth; horsemen
in front, riding two abreast, where the path permitted, their steeds
caparisoned superbly, their plumes waving gaily, and the gleam of their
corselets glittering through the shades of the dusky twilight. A large
and miscellaneous crowd, all armed, some with pikes and mail, others
with less warlike or worse fashioned weapons, followed the cavaliers;
and high above plume and pike floated the blood-red banner of the
Orsini, with the motto and device (in which was ostentatiously displayed
the Guelfic badge of the keys of St. Peter) wrought in burnished gold.
A momentary fear crossed the boy’s mind, for at that time, and in that
city, a nobleman begirt with his swordsmen was more dreaded than a wild
beast by the plebeians; but it was already too late to fly--the train
were upon him.

“Ho, boy!” cried the leader of the horsemen, Martino di Porto, one of
the great House of the Orsini; “hast thou seen a boat pass up the
river?--But thou must have seen it--how long since?”

“I saw a large boat about half an hour ago,” answered the boy, terrified
by the rough voice and imperious bearing of the cavalier.

“Sailing right a-head, with a green flag at the stern?”

“The same, noble sir.”

“On, then! we will stop her course ere the moon rise,” said the baron.
“On!--let the boy go with us, lest he prove traitor, and alarm the
Colonna.”

“An Orsini, an Orsini,” shouted the multitude; “on, on!” and, despite
the prayers and remonstrances of the boy, he was placed in the
thickest of the crowd, and borne, or rather dragged along with the
rest--frightened, breathless, almost weeping, with his poor little
garland still hanging on his arm, while a sling was thrust into his
unwilling hand. Still he felt, through all his alarm, a kind of childish
curiosity to see the result of the pursuit.

By the loud and eager conversation of those about him, he learned that
the vessel he had seen contained a supply of corn destined to a fortress
up the river held by the Colonna, then at deadly feud with the Orsini;
and it was the object of the expedition in which the boy had been thus
lucklessly entrained to intercept the provision, and divert it to
the garrison of Martino di Porto. This news somewhat increased his
consternation, for the boy belonged to a family that claimed the
patronage of the Colonna.

Anxiously and tearfully he looked with every moment up the steep ascent
of the Aventine; but his guardian, his protector, still delayed his
appearance.

They had now proceeded some way, when a winding in the road brought
suddenly before them the object of their pursuit, as, seen by the light
of the earliest stars, it scudded rapidly down the stream.

“Now, the Saints be blest!” quoth the chief; “she is ours!”

“Hold!” said a captain (a German) riding next to Martino, in a half
whisper; “I hear sounds which I like not, by yonder trees--hark! The
neigh of a horse!--by my faith, too, there is the gleam of a corselet.”

“Push on, my masters,” cried Martino; “the heron shall not balk the
eagle--push on!”

With renewed shouts, those on foot pushed forward, till, as they had
nearly gained the copse referred to by the German, a small compact body
of horsemen, armed cap-a-pie, dashed from amidst the trees, and, with
spears in their rests, charged into the ranks of the pursuers.

“A Colonna! a Colonna!” “An Orsini! an Orsini!” were shouts loudly
and fiercely interchanged. Martino di Porto, a man of great bulk and
ferocity, and his cavaliers, who were chiefly German Mercenaries, met
the encounter unshaken. “Beware the bear’s hug,” cried the Orsini, as
down went his antagonist, rider and steed, before his lance.

The contest was short and fierce; the complete armour of the horsemen
protected them on either side from wounds,--not so unscathed fared the
half-armed foot-followers of the Orsini, as they pressed, each pushed on
by the other, against the Colonna. After a shower of stones and darts,
which fell but as hailstones against the thick mail of the horsemen,
they closed in, and, by their number, obstructed the movements of the
steeds, while the spear, sword, and battle-axe of their opponents made
ruthless havoc amongst their undisciplined ranks. And Martino, who cared
little how many of his mere mob were butchered, seeing that his foes
were for the moment embarrassed by the wild rush and gathering circle
of his foot train (for the place of conflict, though wider than the
previous road, was confined and narrow), made a sign to some of his
horsemen, and was about to ride forward towards the boat, now nearly out
of sight, when a bugle at some distance was answered by one of his enemy
at hand; and the shout of “Colonna to the rescue!” was echoed afar off.
A few moments brought in view a numerous train of horse at full speed,
with the banners of the Colonna waving gallantly in the front.

“A plague on the wizards! who would have imagined they had divined us
so craftily!” muttered Martino; “we must not abide these odds;” and the
hand he had first raised for advance, now gave the signal of retreat.

Serried breast to breast and in complete order, the horsemen of Martino
turned to fly; the foot rabble who had come for spoil remained but for
slaughter. They endeavoured to imitate their leaders; but how could they
all elude the rushing chargers and sharp lances of their antagonists,
whose blood was heated by the affray, and who regarded the lives at
their mercy as a boy regards the wasp’s nest he destroys. The crowd
dispersing in all directions,--some, indeed, escaped up the hills, where
the footing was impracticable to the horses; some plunged into the river
and swam across to the opposite bank--those less cool or experienced,
who fled right onwards, served, by clogging the way of their enemy, to
facilitate the flight of their leaders, but fell themselves, corpse upon
corpse, butchered in the unrelenting and unresisted pursuit.

“No quarter to the ruffians--every Orsini slain is a robber the
less--strike for God, the Emperor, and the Colonna!” such were the
shouts which rung the knell of the dismayed and falling fugitives. Among
those who fled onward, in the very path most accessible to the cavalry,
was the young brother of Cola, so innocently mixed with the affray. Fast
he fled, dizzy with terror--poor boy, scarce before ever parted from his
parents’ or his brother’s side!--the trees glided past him--the banks
receded:--on he sped, and fast behind came the tramp of the hoofs--the
shouts--the curses--the fierce laughter of the foe, as they bounded over
the dead and the dying in their path. He was now at the spot in which
his brother had left him; hastily he glanced behind, and saw the couched
lance and horrent crest of the horseman close at his rear; despairingly
he looked up, and behold! his brother bursting through the tangled
brakes that clothed the mountain, and bounding to his succour.

“Save me! save me, brother!” he shrieked aloud, and the shriek reached
Cola’s ear;--the snort of the fiery charger breathed hot upon him;--a
moment more, and with one wild shrill cry of “Mercy, mercy” he fell
to the ground--a corpse: the lance of the pursuer passing through and
through him, from back to breast, and nailing him on the very sod where
he had sate, full of young life and careless hope, not an hour ago.

The horseman plucked forth his spear, and passed on in pursuit of
new victims; his comrades following. Cola had descended,--was on the
spot,--kneeling by his murdered brother. Presently, to the sound of
horn and trumpet, came by a nobler company than most of those hitherto
engaged; who had been, indeed, but the advanced-guard of the Colonna. At
their head rode a man in years, whose long white hair escaped from his
plumed cap and mingled with his venerable beard. “How is this?” said the
chief, reining in his steed, “young Rienzi!”

The youth looked up, as he heard that voice, and then flung himself
before the steed of the old noble, and, clasping his hands, cried out
in a scarce articulate tone: “It is my brother, noble Stephen,--a boy,
a mere child!--the best--the mildest! See how his blood dabbles the
grass;--back, back--your horse’s hoofs are in the stream! Justice, my
Lord, justice!--you are a great man.”

“Who slew him? an Orsini, doubtless; you shall have justice.”

“Thanks, thanks,” murmured Rienzi, as he tottered once more to his
brother’s side, turned the boy’s face from the grass, and strove wildly
to feel the pulse of his heart; he drew back his hand hastily, for it
was crimsoned with blood, and lifting that hand on high, shrieked out
again, “Justice! justice!”

The group round the old Stephen Colonna, hardened as they were in such
scenes, were affected by the sight. A handsome boy, whose tears ran
fast down his cheeks, and who rode his palfrey close by the side of the
Colonna, drew forth his sword. “My Lord,” said he, half sobbing, “an
Orsini only could have butchered a harmless lad like this; let us lose
not a moment,--let us on after the ruffians.”

“No, Adrian, no!” cried Stephen, laying his hand on the boy’s shoulder;
“your zeal is to be lauded, but we must beware an ambush. Our men have
ventured too far--what, ho, there!--sound a return.”

The bugles, in a few minutes, brought back the pursuers,--among them,
the horseman whose spear had been so fatally misused. He was the leader
of those engaged in the conflict with Martino di Porto; and the gold
wrought into his armour, with the gorgeous trappings of his charger,
betokened his rank.

“Thanks, my son, thanks,” said the old Colonna to this cavalier, “you
have done well and bravely. But tell me, knowest thou, for thou hast
an eagle eye, which of the Orsini slew this poor boy?--a foul deed; his
family, too, our clients!”

“Who? yon lad?” replied the horseman, lifting the helmet from his
head, and wiping his heated brow; “say you so! how came he, then, with
Martino’s rascals? I fear me the mistake hath cost him dear. I could but
suppose him of the Orsini rabble, and so--and so--”

“You slew him!” cried Rienzi, in a voice of thunder, starting from
the ground. “Justice! then, my Lord Stephen, justice! you promised me
justice, and I will have it!”

“My poor youth,” said the old man, compassionately, “you should have had
justice against the Orsini; but see you not this has been an error? I
do not wonder you are too grieved to listen to reason now. We must make
this up to you.”

“And let this pay for masses for the boy’s soul; I grieve me much for
the accident,” said the younger Colonna, flinging down a purse of gold.
“Ay, see us at the palace next week, young Cola--next week. My father,
we had best return towards the boat; its safeguard may require us yet.”

“Right, Gianni; stay, some two of you, and see to the poor lad’s
corpse;--a grievous accident! how could it chance?”

The company passed back the way they came, two of the common soldiers
alone remaining, except the boy Adrian, who lingered behind a few
moments, striving to console Rienzi, who, as one bereft of sense,
remained motionless, gazing on the proud array as it swept along, and
muttering to himself, “Justice, justice! I will have it yet.”

The loud voice of the elder Colonna summoned Adrian, reluctantly
and weeping, away. “Let me be your brother,” said the gallant boy,
affectionately pressing the scholar’s hand to his heart; “I want a
brother like you.”

Rienzi made no reply; he did not heed or hear him--dark and stern
thoughts, thoughts in which were the germ of a mighty revolution, were
at his heart. He woke from them with a start, as the soldiers were now
arranging their bucklers so as to make a kind of bier for the corpse,
and then burst into tears as he fiercely motioned them away, and clasped
the clay to his breast till he was literally soaked with the oozing
blood.

The poor child’s garland had not dropped from his arm even when he fell,
and, entangled by his dress, it still clung around him. It was a sight
that recalled to Cola all the gentleness, the kind heart, and winning
graces of his only brother--his only friend! It was a sight that
seemed to make yet more inhuman the untimely and unmerited fate of that
innocent boy. “My brother! my brother!” groaned the survivor; “how shall
I meet our mother?--how shall I meet even night and solitude again?--so
young, so harmless! See ye, sirs, he was but too gentle. And they will
not give us justice, because his murderer was a noble and a Colonna.
And this gold, too--gold for a brother’s blood! Will they not”--and the
young man’s eyes glared like fire--“will they not give us justice?
Time shall show!” so saying, he bent his head over the corpse; his lips
muttered, as with some prayer or invocation; and then rising, his face
was as pale as the dead beside him,--but it was no longer pale with
grief!

From that bloody clay, and that inward prayer, Cola di Rienzi rose a new
being. With his young brother died his own youth. But for that event,
the future liberator of Rome might have been but a dreamer, a scholar, a
poet; the peaceful rival of Petrarch; a man of thoughts, not deeds. But
from that time, all his faculties, energies, fancies, genius, became
concentrated into a single point; and patriotism, before a vision, leapt
into the life and vigour of a passion, lastingly kindled, stubbornly
hardened, and awfully consecrated,--by revenge!



Chapter 1.II. An Historical Survey--not to Be Passed Over, Except by
Those Who Dislike to Understand What They Read.

Years had passed away, and the death of the Roman boy, amidst more noble
and less excusable slaughter, was soon forgotten,--forgotten almost
by the parents of the slain, in the growing fame and fortunes of their
eldest son,--forgotten and forgiven never by that son himself.
But, between that prologue of blood, and the political drama which
ensues,--between the fading interest, as it were, of a dream, and the
more busy, actual, and continuous excitements of sterner life,--this may
be the most fitting time to place before the reader a short and rapid
outline of the state and circumstances of that city in which the
principal scenes of this story are laid;--an outline necessary, perhaps,
to many, for a full comprehension of the motives of the actors, and the
vicissitudes of the plot.

Despite the miscellaneous and mongrel tribes that had forced their
settlements in the City of the Caesars, the Roman population retained
an inordinate notion of their own supremacy over the rest of the world;
and, degenerated from the iron virtues of the Republic, possessed all
the insolent and unruly turbulence which characterised the Plebs of the
ancient Forum. Amongst a ferocious, yet not a brave populace, the
nobles supported themselves less as sagacious tyrants than as relentless
banditti. The popes had struggled in vain against these stubborn and
stern patricians. Their state derided, their command defied, their
persons publicly outraged, the pontiff-sovereigns of the rest of Europe
resided, at the Vatican, as prisoners under terror of execution.
When, thirty-eight years before the date of the events we are about to
witness, a Frenchman, under the name of Clement V., had ascended the
chair of St. Peter, the new pope, with more prudence than valour, had
deserted Rome for the tranquil retreat of Avignon; and the luxurious
town of a foreign province became the court of the Roman pontiff, and
the throne of the Christian Church.

Thus deprived of even the nominal check of the papal presence, the power
of the nobles might be said to have no limits, save their own caprice,
or their mutual jealousies and feuds. Though arrogating through fabulous
genealogies their descent from the ancient Romans, they were, in
reality, for the most part, the sons of the bolder barbarians of the
North; and, contaminated by the craft of Italy, rather than imbued with
its national affections, they retained the disdain of their foreign
ancestors for a conquered soil and a degenerate people. While the rest
of Italy, especially in Florence, in Venice, and in Milan, was fast and
far advancing beyond the other states of Europe in civilisation and in
art, the Romans appeared rather to recede than to improve;--unblest by
laws, unvisited by art, strangers at once to the chivalry of a warlike,
and the graces of a peaceful, people. But they still possessed the
sense and desire of liberty, and, by ferocious paroxysms and desperate
struggles, sought to vindicate for their city the title it still assumed
of “the Metropolis of the World.” For the last two centuries they had
known various revolutions--brief, often bloody, and always unsuccessful.
Still, there was the empty pageant of a popular form of government. The
thirteen quarters of the city named each a chief; and the assembly of
these magistrates, called Caporioni, by theory possessed an authority
they had neither the power nor the courage to exert. Still there was the
proud name of Senator; but, at the present time, the office was confined
to one or to two persons, sometimes elected by the pope, sometimes by
the nobles. The authority attached to the name seems to have had no
definite limit; it was that of a stern dictator, or an indolent puppet,
according as he who held it had the power to enforce the dignity he
assumed. It was never conceded but to nobles, and it was by the nobles
that all the outrages were committed. Private enmity alone was gratified
whenever public justice was invoked: and the vindication of order was
but the execution of revenge.

Holding their palaces as the castles and fortresses of princes, each
asserting his own independency of all authority and law, and planting
fortifications, and claiming principalities in the patrimonial
territories of the Church, the barons of Rome made their state still
more secure, and still more odious, by the maintenance of troops of
foreign (chiefly of German) mercenaries, at once braver in disposition,
more disciplined in service, and more skilful in arms, than even the
freest Italians of that time. Thus they united the judicial and the
military force, not for the protection, but for the ruin of Rome. Of
these barons, the most powerful were the Orsini and Colonna; their feuds
were hereditary and incessant, and every day witnessed the fruits of
their lawless warfare, in bloodshed, in rape, and in conflagration.
The flattery or the friendship of Petrarch, too credulously believed by
modern historians, has invested the Colonna, especially of the date now
entered upon, with an elegance and a dignity not their own. Outrage,
fraud, and assassination, a sordid avarice in securing lucrative offices
to themselves, an insolent oppression of their citizens, and the
most dastardly cringing to power superior to their own (with but few
exceptions), mark the character of the first family of Rome. But,
wealthier than the rest of the barons, they were, therefore, more
luxurious, and, perhaps, more intellectual; and their pride was
flattered in being patrons of those arts of which they could never
have become the professors. From these multiplied oppressors the Roman
citizens turned with fond and impatient regret to their ignorant and
dark notions of departed liberty and greatness. They confounded the
times of the Empire with those of the Republic; and often looked to the
Teutonic king, who obtained his election from beyond the Alps, but his
title of emperor from the Romans, as the deserter of his legitimate
trust and proper home; vainly imagining that, if both the Emperor and
the Pontiff fixed their residence in Rome, Liberty and Law would again
seek their natural shelter beneath the resuscitated majesty of the Roman
people.

The absence of the pope and the papal court served greatly to impoverish
the citizens; and they had suffered yet more visibly by the depredations
of hordes of robbers, numerous and unsparing, who infested Romagna,
obstructing all the public ways, and were, sometimes secretly,
sometimes, openly, protected by the barons, who often recruited their
banditti garrisons by banditti soldiers.

But besides the lesser and ignobler robbers, there had risen in Italy
a far more formidable description of freebooters. A German, who assumed
the lofty title of the Duke Werner, had, a few years prior to the period
we approach, enlisted and organised a considerable force, styled “The
Great Company,” with which he besieged cities and invaded states,
without any object less shameless than that of pillage. His example was
soon imitated: numerous “Companies,” similarly constituted, devastated
the distracted and divided land. They appeared, suddenly raised, as if
by magic, before the walls of a city, and demanded immense sums as the
purchase of peace. Neither tyrant nor common wealth maintained a force
sufficient to resist them; and if other northern mercenaries were
engaged to oppose them, it was only to recruit the standards of the
freebooters with deserters. Mercenary fought not mercenary--nor German,
German: and greater pay, and more unbridled rapine, made the tents of
the “Companies” far more attractive than the regulated stipends of a
city, or the dull fortress and impoverished coffers of a chief. Werner,
the most implacable and ferocious of all these adventurers, and who had
so openly gloried in his enormities as to wear upon his breast a silver
plate, engraved with the words, “Enemy to God, to Pity, and to Mercy,”
 had not long since ravaged Romagna with fire and sword. But, whether
induced by money, or unable to control the fierce spirits he had
raised, he afterwards led the bulk of his company back to Germany. Small
detachments, however, remained, scattered throughout the land, waiting
only an able leader once more to re-unite them: amongst those who
appeared most fitted for that destiny was Walter de Montreal, a Knight
of St. John, and gentleman of Provence, whose valour and military genius
had already, though yet young, raised his name into dreaded celebrity;
and whose ambition, experience, and sagacity, relieved by certain
chivalric and noble qualities, were suited to enterprises far greater
and more important than the violent depredations of the atrocious
Werner. From these scourges, no state had suffered more grievously than
Rome. The patrimonial territories of the pope,--in part wrested from him
by petty tyrants, in part laid waste by these foreign robbers,--yielded
but a scanty supply to the necessities of Clement VI., the most
accomplished gentleman and the most graceful voluptuary of his time; and
the good father had devised a plan, whereby to enrich at once the Romans
and their pontiff.

Nearly fifty years before the time we enter upon, in order both to
replenish the papal coffers and pacify the starving Romans, Boniface
VIII. had instituted the Festival of the Jubilee, or Holy Year; in fact,
a revival of a Pagan ceremonial. A plenary indulgence was promised
to every Catholic who, in that year, and in the first year of every
succeeding century, should visit the churches of St. Peter and St. Paul.
An immense concourse of pilgrims, from every part of Christendom, had
attested the wisdom of the invention; “and two priests stood night and
day, with rakes in their hands, to collect without counting the heaps
of gold and silver that were poured on the altar of St. Paul.” (Gibbon,
vol. xii. c. 59.)

It is not to be wondered at that this most lucrative festival should,
ere the next century was half expired, appear to a discreet pontiff
to be too long postponed. And both pope and city agreed in thinking it
might well bear a less distant renewal. Accordingly, Clement VI. had
proclaimed, under the name of the Mosaic Jubilee, a second Holy Year
for 1350--viz., three years distant from that date at which, in the
next chapter, my narrative will commence. This circumstance had a great
effect in whetting the popular indignation against the barons, and
preparing the events I shall relate; for the roads were, as I before
said, infested by the banditti, the creatures and allies of the barons.
And if the roads were not cleared, the pilgrims might not attend. It
was the object of the pope’s vicar, Raimond, bishop of Orvietto (bad
politician and good canonist), to seek, by every means, to remove all
impediment between the offerings of devotion and the treasury of St.
Peter.

Such, in brief, was the state of Rome at the period we are about to
examine. Her ancient mantle of renown still, in the eyes of Italy and of
Europe, cloaked her ruins. In name, at least, she was still the queen
of the earth; and from her hands came the crown of the emperor of the
north, and the keys of the father of the church. Her situation was
precisely that which presented a vase and glittering triumph to
bold ambition,--an inspiring, if mournful, spectacle to determined
patriotism,--and a fitting stage for that more august tragedy which
seeks its incidents, selects its actors, and shapes its moral, amidst
the vicissitudes and crimes of nations.



Chapter 1.III. The Brawl.

On an evening in April, 1347, and in one of those wide spaces in which
Modern and Ancient Rome seemed blent together--equally desolate and
equally in ruins--a miscellaneous and indignant populace were assembled.
That morning the house of a Roman jeweller had been forcibly entered and
pillaged by the soldiers of Martino di Porto, with a daring effrontery
which surpassed even the ordinary licence of the barons. The sympathy
and sensation throughout the city were deep and ominous.

“Never will I submit to this tyranny!”

“Nor I!”

“Nor I!”

“Nor by the bones of St. Peter, will I!”

“And what, my friends, is this tyranny to which you will not submit?”
 said a young nobleman, addressing himself to the crowd of citizens who,
heated, angry, half-armed, and with the vehement gestures of Italian
passion, were now sweeping down the long and narrow street that led to
the gloomy quarter occupied by the Orsini.

“Ah, my lord!” cried two or three of the citizens in a breath, “you will
right us--you will see justice done to us--you are a Colonna.”

“Ha, ha, ha!” laughed scornfully one man of gigantic frame, and wielding
on high a huge hammer, indicative of his trade. “Justice and Colonna!
body of God! those names are not often found together.”

“Down with him! down with him! he is an Orsinist--down with him!” cried
at least ten of the throng: but no hand was raised against the giant.

“He speaks the truth,” said a second voice, firmly.

“Ay, that doth he,” said a third, knitting his brows, and unsheathing
his knife, “and we will abide by it. The Orsini are tyrants--and the
Colonnas are, at the best, as bad.”

“Thou liest in thy teeth, ruffian!” cried the young noble, advancing
into the press and confronting the last asperser of the Colonna.

Before the flashing eye and menacing gesture of the cavalier, the worthy
brawler retreated some steps, so as to leave an open space between the
towering form of the smith, and the small, slender, but vigorous frame
of the young noble.

Taught from their birth to despise the courage of the plebeians, even
while careless of much reputation as to their own, the patricians of
Rome were not unaccustomed to the rude fellowship of these brawls; nor
was it unoften that the mere presence of a noble sufficed to scatter
whole crowds, that had the moment before been breathing vengeance
against his order and his house.

Waving his hand, therefore, to the smith, and utterly unheeding either
his brandished weapon or his vast stature, the young Adrian di Castello,
a distant kinsman of the Colonna, haughtily bade him give way.

“To your homes, friends! and know,” he added, with some dignity, “that
ye wrong us much, if ye imagine we share the evil-doings of the Orsini,
or are pandering solely to our own passions in the feud between their
house and ours. May the Holy Mother so judge me,” continued he, devoutly
lifting up his eyes, “as I now with truth declare, that it is for your
wrongs, and for the wrongs of Rome, that I have drawn this sword against
the Orsini.”

“So say all the tyrants,” rejoined the smith, hardily, as he leant his
hammer against a fragment of stone--some remnant of ancient Rome--“they
never fight against each other, but it is for our good. One Colonna cuts
me the throat of Orsini’s baker--it is for our good! Another Colonna
seizes on the daughter of Orsini’s tailor--it is for our good! our
good--yes, for the good of the people! the good of the bakers and
tailors, eh?”

“Fellow,” said the young nobleman, gravely, “if a Colonna did thus, he
did wrong; but the holiest cause may have bad supporters.”

“Yes, the holy Church itself is propped on very in different columns,”
 answered the smith, in a rude witticism on the affection of the pope for
the Colonna.

“He blasphemes! the smith blasphemes!” cried the partisans of that
powerful house. “A Colonna, a Colonna!”

“An Orsini, an Orsini!” was no less promptly the counter cry.

“The People!” shouted the smith, waving his formidable weapon far above
the heads of the group.

In an instant the whole throng, who had at first united against the
aggression of one man, were divided by the hereditary wrath of faction.
At the cry of Orsini, several new partisans hurried to the spot; the
friends of the Colonna drew themselves on one side--the defenders of
the Orsini on the other--and the few who agreed with the smith that both
factions were equally odious, and the people was the sole legitimate
cry in a popular commotion, would have withdrawn themselves from the
approaching melee, if the smith himself, who was looked upon by them as
an authority of great influence, had not--whether from resentment at the
haughty bearing of the young Colonna, or from that appetite of contest
not uncommon in men of a bulk and force which assure them in all
personal affrays the lofty pleasure of superiority--if, I say, the smith
himself had not, after a pause of indecision, retired among the Orsini,
and entrained, by his example, the alliance of his friends with the
favourers of that faction.

In popular commotions, each man is whirled along with the herd, often
half against his own approbation or assent. The few words of peace
by which Adrian di Castello commenced an address to his friends were
drowned amidst their shouts. Proud to find in their ranks one of the
most beloved, and one of the noblest of that name, the partisans of
the Colonna placed him in their front, and charged impetuously on their
foes. Adrian, however, who had acquired from circumstances something of
that chivalrous code which he certainly could not have owed to his Roman
birth, disdained at first to assault men among whom he recognised no
equal, either in rank or the practice of arms. He contented himself with
putting aside the few strokes that were aimed at him in the gathering
confusion of the conflict--few; for those who recognised him, even
amidst the bitterest partisans of the Orsini, were not willing to expose
themselves to the danger and odium of spilling the blood of a man, who,
in addition to his great birth and the terrible power of his connexions,
was possessed of a personal popularity, which he owed rather to a
comparison with the vices of his relatives than to any remarkable
virtues hitherto displayed by himself. The smith alone, who had as
yet taken no active part in the fray, seemed to gather himself up in
determined opposition as the cavalier now advanced within a few steps of
him.

“Did we not tell thee,” quoth the giant, frowning, “that the Colonna
were, not less than the Orsini, the foes of the people? Look at thy
followers and clients: are they not cutting the throats of humble men by
way of vengeance for the crime of a great one? But that is the way one
patrician always scourges the insolence of another. He lays the rod on
the backs of the people, and then cries, ‘See how just I am!’”

“I do not answer thee now,” answered Adrian; “but if thou regrettest
with me this waste of blood, join with me in attempting to prevent it.”

“I--not I! let the blood of the slaves flow today: the time is fast
coming when it shall be washed away by the blood of the lords.”

“Away, ruffian!” said Adrian, seeking no further parley, and touching
the smith with the flat side of his sword. In an instant the hammer of
the smith swung in the air, and, but for the active spring of the young
noble, would infallibly have crushed him to the earth. Ere the smith
could gain time for a second blow, Adrian’s sword passed twice through
his right arm, and the weapon fell heavily to the ground.

“Slay him, slay him!” cried several of the clients of the Colonna, now
pressing, dastard-like, round the disarmed and disabled smith.

“Ay, slay him!” said, in tolerable Italian, but with a barbarous accent,
one man, half-clad in armour, who had but just joined the group, and who
was one of those wild German bandits whom the Colonna held in their pay;
“he belongs to a horrible gang of miscreants sworn against all order
and peace. He is one of Rienzi’s followers, and, bless the Three Kings!
raves about the People.”

“Thou sayest right, barbarian,” said the sturdy smith, in a loud voice,
and tearing aside the vest from his breast with his left hand; “come
all--Colonna and Orsini--dig to this heart with your sharp blades, and
when you have reached the centre, you will find there the object of your
common hatred--‘Rienzi and the People!’”

As he uttered these words, in language that would have seemed above his
station (if a certain glow and exaggeration of phrase and sentiment were
not common, when excited, to all the Romans), the loudness of his voice
rose above the noise immediately round him, and stilled, for an instant,
the general din; and when, at last, the words, “Rienzi and the People”
 rang forth, they penetrated midway through the increasing crowd, and
were answered as by an echo, with a hundred voices--“Rienzi and the
People!”

But whatever impression the words of the mechanic made on others, it was
equally visible in the young Colonna. At the name of Rienzi the glow
of excitement vanished from his cheek; he started back, muttered to
himself, and for a moment seemed, even in the midst of that stirring
commotion, to be lost in a moody and distant revery. He recovered, as
the shout died away; and saying to the smith, in a low tone, “Friend, I
am sorry for thy wound; but seek me on the morrow, and thou shalt find
thou hast wronged me;” he beckoned to the German to follow him, and
threaded his way through the crowd, which generally gave back as he
advanced. For the bitterest hatred to the order of the nobles was at
that time in Rome mingled with a servile respect for their persons, and
a mysterious awe of their uncontrollable power.

As Adrian passed through that part of the crowd in which the fray had
not yet commenced, the murmurs that followed him were not those which
many of his race could have heard.

“A Colonna,” said one.

“Yet no ravisher,” said another, laughing wildly.

“Nor murtherer,” muttered a third, pressing his hand to his breast.
“‘Tis not against him that my father’s blood cries aloud.”

“Bless him,” said a fourth, “for as yet no man curses him!”

“Ah, God help us!” said an old man, with a long grey beard, leaning on
his staff: “The serpent’s young yet; the fangs will show by and by.”

“For shame, father! he is a comely youth, and not proud in the least.
What a smile he hath!” quoth a fair matron, who kept on the outskirt of
the melee.

“Farewell to a man’s honour when a noble smiles on his wife!” was the
answer.

“Nay,” said Luigi, a jolly butcher, with a roguish eye, “what a man
can win fairly from maid or wife, that let him do, whether plebeian or
noble--that’s my morality; but when an ugly old patrician finds fair
words will not win fair looks, and carries me off a dame on the back of
a German boar, with a stab in the side for comfort to the spouse,--then,
I say, he is a wicked man, and an adulterer.”

While such were the comments and the murmurs that followed the noble,
very different were the looks and words that attended the German
soldier.

Equally, nay, with even greater promptitude, did the crowd make way at
his armed and heavy tread; but not with looks of reverence:--the eye
glared as he approached; but the cheek grew pale--the head bowed--the
lip quivered; each man felt a shudder of hate and fear, as recognizing
a dread and mortal foe. And well and wrathfully did the fierce
mercenary note the signs of the general aversion. He pushed on
rudely--half-smiling in contempt, half-frowning in revenge, as he looked
from side to side; and his long, matted, light hair, tawny-coloured
moustache, and brawny front, contrasted strongly with the dark eyes,
raven locks, and slender frames of the Italians.

“May Lucifer double damn those German cut-throats!” muttered, between
his grinded teeth, one of the citizens.

“Amen!” answered, heartily, another.

“Hush!” said a third, timorously looking round; “if one of them hear
thee, thou art a lost man.”

“Oh, Rome! Rome! to what art thou fallen!” said bitterly one citizen,
clothed in black, and of a higher seeming than the rest; “when thou
shudderest in thy streets at the tread of a hired barbarian!”

“Hark to one of our learned men, and rich citizens!” said the butcher,
reverently.

“‘Tis a friend of Rienzi’s,” quoth another of the group, lifting his
cap.

With downcast eyes, and a face in which grief, shame, and wrath, were
visibly expressed, Pandulfo di Guido, a citizen of birth and repute,
swept slowly through the crowd, and disappeared.

Meanwhile, Adrian, having gained a street which, though in the
neighbourhood of the crowd, was empty and desolate, turned to his fierce
comrade. “Rodolf!” said he, “mark!--no violence to the citizens. Return
to the crowd, collect the friends of our house, withdraw them from the
scene; let not the Colonna be blamed for this day’s violence; and assure
our followers, in my name, that I swear, by the knighthood I received at
the Emperor’s hands, that by my sword shall Martino di Porto be punished
for his outrage. Fain would I, in person, allay the tumult, but my
presence only seems to sanction it. Go--thou hast weight with them all.”

“Ay, Signor, the weight of blows!” answered the grim soldier. “But the
command is hard; I would fain let their puddle-blood flow an hour or
two longer. Yet, pardon me; in obeying thy orders, do I obey those of my
master, thy kinsman? It is old Stephen Colonna--who seldom spares blood
or treasure, God bless him--(save his own!)--whose money I hold, and to
whose hests I am sworn.”

“Diavolo!” muttered the cavalier, and the angry spot was on his cheek;
but, with the habitual self-control of the Italian nobles, he smothered
his rising choler, and said aloud, with calmness, but dignity--

“Do as I bid thee; check this tumult--make us the forbearing party.
Let all be still within one hour hence, and call on me tomorrow for thy
reward; be this purse an earnest of my future thanks. As for my kinsman,
whom I command thee to name more reverently, ‘tis in his name I speak.
Hark! the din increases--the contest swells--go--lose not another
moment.”

Somewhat awed by the quiet firmness of the patrician, Rodolf nodded,
without answer, slid the money into his bosom, and stalked away into the
thickest of the throng. But, even ere he arrived, a sudden reaction had
taken place.

The young cavalier, left alone in that spot, followed with his eyes the
receding form of the mercenary, as the sun, now setting, shone slant
upon his glittering casque, and said bitterly to himself--“Unfortunate
city, fountain of all mighty memories--fallen queen of a thousand
nations--how art thou decrowned and spoiled by thy recreant and apostate
children! Thy nobles divided against themselves--thy people cursing thy
nobles--thy priests, who should sow peace, planting discord--the father
of thy church deserting thy stately walls, his home a refuge, his mitre
a fief, his court a Gallic village--and we! we, of the haughtiest
blood of Rome--we, the sons of Caesars, and of the lineage of demigods,
guarding an insolent and abhorred state by the swords of hirelings, who
mock our cowardice while they receive our pay--who keep our citizens
slaves, and lord it over their very masters in return! Oh, that we, the
hereditary chiefs of Rome, could but feel--oh, that we could but find,
our only legitimate safeguard in the grateful hearts of our countrymen!”

So deeply did the young Adrian feel the galling truth of all he uttered,
that the indignant tears rolled down his cheeks as he spoke. He felt no
shame as he dashed them away; for that weakness which weeps for a fallen
race, is the tenderness not of women but of angels.

As he turned slowly to quit the spot, his steps were suddenly arrested
by a loud shout: “Rienzi! Rienzi!” smote the air. From the walls of the
Capitol to the bed of the glittering Tiber, that name echoed far and
wide; and, as the shout died away, it was swallowed up in a silence so
profound, so universal, so breathless, that you might have imagined that
death itself had fallen over the city. And now, at the extreme end of
the crowd, and elevated above their level, on vast fragments of stone
which had been dragged from the ruins of Rome in one of the late
frequent tumults between contending factions, to serve as a barricade
for citizens against citizens,--on these silent memorials of the past
grandeur, the present misery, of Rome, stood that extraordinary man,
who, above all his race, was the most penetrated with the glories of the
one time, with the degradation of the other.

From the distance at which he stood from the scene, Adrian could only
distinguish the dark outline of Rienzi’s form; he could only hear the
faint sound of his mighty voice; he could only perceive, in the subdued
yet waving sea of human beings that spread around, their heads bared
in the last rays of the sun, the unutterable effect which an eloquence,
described by contemporaries almost as miraculous,--but in reality
less so from the genius of the man than the sympathy of the
audience,--created in all, who drank into their hearts and souls the
stream of its burning thoughts.

It was but for a short time that that form was visible to the earnest
eye, that that voice at intervals reached the straining ear, of Adrian
di Castello; but that time sufficed to produce all the effect which
Adrian himself had desired.

Another shout, more earnest, more prolonged than the first--a shout,
in which spoke the release of swelling thoughts, of intense
excitement--betokened the close of the harangue; and then you might
see, after a minute’s pause, the crowd breaking in all directions, and
pouring down the avenues in various knots and groups, each testifying
the strong and lasting impression made upon the multitude by that
address. Every cheek was flushed--every tongue spoke: the animation of
the orator had passed, like a living spirit, into the breasts of the
audience. He had thundered against the disorders of the patricians, yet,
by a word, he had disarmed the anger of the plebeians--he had preached
freedom, yet he had opposed licence. He had calmed the present, by a
promise of the future. He had chid their quarrels, yet had supported
their cause. He had mastered the revenge of today, by a solemn assurance
that there should come justice for the morrow. So great may be the
power, so mighty the eloquence, so formidable the genius, of one
man,--without arms, without rank, without sword or ermine, who addresses
himself to a people that is oppressed!



Chapter 1.IV. An Adventure.

Avoiding the broken streams of the dispersed crowd, Adrian Colonna
strode rapidly down one of the narrow streets leading to his palace,
which was situated at no inconsiderable distance from the place in which
the late contest had occurred. The education of his life made him feel
a profound interest, not only in the divisions and disputes of his
country, but also in the scene he had just witnessed, and the authority
exercised by Rienzi.

An orphan of a younger, but opulent branch of the Colonna, Adrian had
been brought up under the care and guardianship of his kinsman, that
astute, yet valiant Stephen Colonna, who, of all the nobles of Rome, was
the most powerful, alike from the favour of the pope, and the number
of armed hirelings whom his wealth enabled him to maintain. Adrian
had early manifested what in that age was considered an extraordinary
disposition towards intellectual pursuits, and had acquired much of
the little that was then known of the ancient language and the ancient
history of his country.

Though Adrian was but a boy at the time in which, first presented to the
reader, he witnessed the emotions of Rienzi at the death of his brother,
his kind heart had been penetrated with sympathy for Cola’s affliction,
and shame for the apathy of his kinsmen at the result of their own
feuds. He had earnestly sought the friendship of Rienzi, and, despite
his years, had become aware of the power and energy of his character.
But though Rienzi, after a short time, had appeared to think no more of
his brother’s death--though he again entered the halls of the Colonna,
and shared their disdainful hospitalities, he maintained a certain
distance and reserve of manner, which even Adrian could only partially
overcome. He rejected every offer of service, favour, or promotion; and
any unwonted proof of kindness from Adrian seemed, instead of making him
more familiar, to offend him into colder distance. The easy humour and
conversational vivacity which had first rendered him a welcome guest
with those who passed their lives between fighting and feasting, had
changed into a vein ironical, cynical, and severe. But the dull barons
were equally amused at his wit, and Adrian was almost the only one who
detected the serpent couched beneath the smile.

Often Rienzi sat at the feast, silent, but observant, as if watching
every look, weighing every word, taking gauge and measurement of the
intellect, policy, temperament, of every guest; and when he had seemed
to satisfy himself, his spirits would rise, his words flow, and
while his dazzling but bitter wit lit up the revel, none saw that the
unmirthful flash was the token of the coming storm. But all the while,
he neglected no occasion to mix with the humbler citizens, to stir up
their minds, to inflame their imaginations, to kindle their emulation,
with pictures of the present and with legends of the past. He grew in
popularity and repute, and was yet more in power with the herd, because
in favour with the nobles. Perhaps it was for that reason that he had
continued the guest of the Colonna.

When, six years before the present date, the Capitol of the Caesars
witnessed the triumph of Petrarch, the scholastic fame of the young
Rienzi had attracted the friendship of the poet,--a friendship that
continued, with slight interruption, to the last, through careers
so widely different; and afterwards, one among the Roman Deputies to
Avignon, he had been conjoined with Petrarch (According to the modern
historians; but it seems more probable that Rienzi’s mission to Avignon
was posterior to that of Petrarch. However this be, it was at Avignon
that Petrarch and Rienzi became most intimate, as Petrarch himself
observes in one of his letters.) to supplicate Clement VI. to remove
the Holy See from Avignon to Rome. It was in this mission that, for
the first time, he evinced his extraordinary powers of eloquence and
persuasion. The pontiff, indeed, more desirous of ease than glory, was
not convinced by the arguments, but he was enchanted with the pleader;
and Rienzi returned to Rome, loaded with honours, and clothed with the
dignity of high and responsible office. No longer the inactive scholar,
the gay companion, he rose at once to pre-eminence above all his
fellow-citizens. Never before had authority been borne with so austere
an integrity, so uncorrupt a zeal. He had sought to impregnate his
colleagues with the same loftiness of principle--he had failed. Now
secure in his footing, he had begun openly to appeal to the people; and
already a new spirit seemed to animate the populace of Rome.

While these were the fortunes of Rienzi, Adrian had been long separated
from him, and absent from Rome.

The Colonna were staunch supporters of the imperial party, and Adrian di
Castello had received and obeyed an invitation to the Emperor’s court.
Under that monarch he had initiated himself in arms, and, among the
knights of Germany, he had learned to temper the natural Italian
shrewdness with the chivalry of northern valour.

In leaving Bavaria, he had sojourned a short time in the solitude of one
of his estates by the fairest lake of northern Italy; and thence, with
a mind improved alike by action and study, had visited many of the free
Italian states, imbibed sentiments less prejudiced than those of his
order, and acquired an early reputation for himself while inly marking
the characters and deeds of others. In him, the best qualities of the
Italian noble were united. Passionately addicted to the cultivation
of letters, subtle and profound in policy, gentle and bland of manner,
dignifying a love of pleasure with a certain elevation of taste, he yet
possessed a gallantry of conduct, and purity of honour, and an
aversion from cruelty, which were then very rarely found in the Italian
temperament, and which even the Chivalry of the North, while maintaining
among themselves, usually abandoned the moment they came into contact
with the systematic craft and disdain of honesty, which made the
character of the ferocious, yet wily, South. With these qualities he
combined, indeed, the softer passions of his countrymen,--he adored
Beauty, and he made a deity of Love.

He had but a few weeks returned to his native city, whither his
reputation had already preceded him, and where his early affection for
letters and gentleness of bearing were still remembered. He returned to
find the position of Rienzi far more altered than his own. Adrian had
not yet sought the scholar. He wished first to judge with his own eyes,
and at a distance, of the motives and object of his conduct; for partly
he caught the suspicions which his own order entertained of Rienzi, and
partly he shared in the trustful enthusiasm of the people.

“Certainly,” said he now to himself, as he walked musingly onward,
“certainly, no man has it more in his power to reform our diseased
state, to heal our divisions, to awaken our citizens to the
recollections of ancestral virtue. But that very power, how dangerous
is it! Have I not seen, in the free states of Italy, men, called into
authority for the sake of preserving the people, honest themselves at
first, and then, drunk with the sudden rank, betraying the very cause
which had exalted them? True, those men were chiefs and nobles; but are
plebeians less human? Howbeit I have heard and seen enough from afar,--I
will now approach, and examine the man himself.”

While thus soliloquizing, Adrian but little noted the various
passengers, who, more and more rarely as the evening waned, hastened
homeward. Among these were two females, who now alone shared with Adrian
the long and gloomy street into which he had entered. The moon was
already bright in the heavens, and, as the women passed the cavalier
with a light and quick step, the younger one turned back and regarded
him by the clear light with an eager, yet timid glance.

“Why dost thou tremble, my pretty one!” said her companion, who might
have told some five-and-forty years, and whose garb and voice bespoke
her of inferior rank to the younger female. “The streets seem quiet
enough now, and, the Virgin be praised! we are not so far from home
either.”

“Oh, Benedetta, it is he! it is the young signor--it is Adrian!”

“That is fortunate,” said the nurse, for such was her condition, “since
they say he is as bold as a Northman: and as the Palazzo Colonna is not
very far from hence, we shall be within reach of his aid should we want
it: that is to say, sweet one, if you will walk a little slower than you
have yet done.”

The young lady slackened her pace, and sighed.

“He is certainly very handsome,” quoth the nurse: “but thou must not
think more of him; he is too far above thee for marriage, and for aught
else, thou art too honest, and thy brother too proud--”

“And thou, Benedetta, art too quick with thy tongue. How canst thou talk
thus, when thou knowest he hath never, since, at least, I was a mere
child, even addressed me: nay, he scarce knows of my very existence. He,
the Lord Adrian di Castello, dream of the poor Irene! The mere thought
is madness!”

“Then why,” said the nurse, briskly, “dost thou dream of him?”

Her companion sighed again more deeply than at first.

“Holy St. Catherine!” continued Benedetta, “if there were but one man in
the world, I would die single ere I would think of him, until, at least,
he had kissed my hand twice, and left it my own fault if it were not my
lips instead.”

The young lady still replied not.

“But how didst thou contrive to love him?” asked the nurse. “Thou canst
not have seen him very often: it is but some four or five weeks since
his return to Rome.”

“Oh, how dull art thou?” answered the fair Irene. “Have I not told thee
again and again, that I loved him six years ago?”

“When thou hadst told but thy tenth year, and a doll would have been thy
most suitable lover! As I am a Christian, Signora, thou hast made good
use of thy time.

“And during his absence,” continued the girl, fondly, yet sadly, “did
I not hear him spoken of, and was not the mere sound of his name like a
love-gift that bade me remember? And when they praised him, have I not
rejoiced? and when they blamed him, have I not resented? and when they
said that his lance was victorious in the tourney, did I not weep with
pride? and when they whispered that his vows were welcome in the bower,
wept I not as fervently with grief? Have not the six years of his
absence been a dream, and was not his return a waking into light--a
morning of glory and the sun? and I see him now in the church when he
wots not of me; and on his happy steed as he passes by my lattice: and
is not that enough of happiness for love?”

“But if he loves not thee?”

“Fool! I ask not that;--nay, I know not if I wish it. Perhaps I would
rather dream of him, such as I would have him, than know him for what
he is. He might be unkind, or ungenerous, or love me but little; rather
would I not be loved at all, than loved coldly, and eat away my heart by
comparing it with his. I can love him now as something abstract, unreal,
and divine: but what would be my shame, my grief, if I were to find him
less than I have imagined! Then, indeed, my life would have been wasted;
then, indeed, the beauty of the earth would be gone!”

The good nurse was not very capable of sympathizing with sentiments like
these. Even had their characters been more alike, their disparity of age
would have rendered such sympathy impossible. What but youth can echo
back the soul of youth--all the music of its wild vanities and romantic
follies? The good nurse did not sympathize with the sentiments of her
young lady, but she sympathised with the deep earnestness with which
they were expressed. She thought it wondrous silly, but wondrous moving;
she wiped her eyes with the corner of her veil, and hoped in her secret
heart that her young charge would soon get a real husband to put such
unsubstantial fantasies out of her head. There was a short pause in
their conversation, when, just where two streets crossed one another,
there was heard a loud noise of laughing voices and trampling feet.
Torches were seen on high affronting the pale light of the moon; and,
at a very short distance from the two females, in the cross street,
advanced a company of seven or eight men, bearing, as seen by the red
light of the torches, the formidable badge of the Orsini.

Amidst the other disorders of the time, it was no unfrequent custom
for the younger or more dissolute of the nobles, in small and armed
companies, to parade the streets at night, seeking occasion for a
licentious gallantry among the cowering citizens, or a skirmish at arms
with some rival stragglers of their own order. Such a band had Irene and
her companion now chanced to encounter.

“Holy mother!” cried Benedetta, turning pale, and half running, “what
curse has befallen us? How could we have been so foolish as to tarry so
late at the lady Nina’s! Run, Signora,--run, or we shall fall into their
hands!”

But the advice of Benedetta came too late,--the fluttering garments
of the women had been already descried: in a moment more they were
surrounded by the marauders. A rude hand tore aside Benedetta’s veil,
and at sight of features, which, if time had not spared, it could never
very materially injure, the rough aggressor cast the poor nurse against
the wall with a curse, which was echoed by a loud laugh from his
comrades.

“Thou hast a fine fortune in faces Giuseppe!”

“Yes; it was but the other day that he seized on a girl of sixty.”

“And then, by way of improving her beauty, cut her across the face with
his dagger, because she was not sixteen!”

“Hush, fellows! whom have we here?” said the chief of the party, a man
richly dressed, and who, though bordering upon middle age, had only
the more accustomed himself to the excesses of youth; as he spoke,
he snatched the trembling Irene from the grasp of his followers. “Ho,
there! the torches! Oh che bella faccia! what blushes--what eyes!--nay,
look not down, pretty one; thou needst not be ashamed to win the love
of an Orsini--yes; know the triumph thou hast achieved--it is Martino di
Porto who bids thee smile upon him!”

“For the blest Mother’s sake release me! Nay, sir, this must not be--I
am not unfriended--this insult shall not pass!”

“Hark to her silver chiding; it is better than my best hound’s bay!
This adventure is worth a month’s watching. What! will you not
come?--restive--shrieks too!--Francesco, Pietro, ye are the gentlest of
the band. Wrap her veil around her,--muffle this music;--so! bear her
before me to the palace, and tomorrow, sweet one, thou shalt go home
with a basket of florins which thou mayest say thou hast bought at
market.”

But Irene’s shrieks, Irene’s struggles, had already brought succour to
her side, and, as Adrian approached the spot, the nurse flung herself on
her knees before him.

“Oh, sweet signor, for Christ’s grace save us! Deliver my young
mistress--her friends love you well! We are all for the Colonna,
my lord; yes, indeed, all for the Colonna! Save the kin of your own
clients, gracious signor!”

“It is enough that she is a woman,” answered Adrian, adding, between his
teeth, “and that an Orsini is her assailant.” He strode haughtily into
the thickest of the group; the servitors laid hands on their swords, but
gave way before him as they recognised his person; he reached the two
men who had already seized Irene; in one moment he struck the foremost
to the ground, in another, he had passed his left arm round the light
and slender form of the maiden, and stood confronting the Orsini with
his drawn blade, which, however, he pointed to the ground.

“For shame, my lord--for shame!” said he, indignantly. “Will you force
Rome to rise, to a man, against our order? Vex not too far the lion,
chained though he be; war against us if ye will! draw your blades upon
men, though they be of your own race, and speak your own tongue: but
if ye would sleep at nights, and not dread the avenger’s gripe,--if ye
would walk the market-place secure,--wrong not a Roman woman! Yes, the
very walls around us preach to you the punishment of such a deed: for
that offence fell the Tarquins,--for that offence were swept away the
Decemvirs,--for that offence, if ye rush upon it, the blood of your
whole house may flow like water. Cease, then, my lord, from this mad
attempt, so unworthy your great name; cease, and thank even a Colonna
that he has come between you and a moment’s frenzy!”

So noble, so lofty were the air and gesture of Adrian, as he thus
spoke, that even the rude servitors felt a thrill of approbation and
remorse--not so Martino di Porto. He had been struck with the beauty of
the prey thus suddenly snatched from him; he had been accustomed to
long outrage and to long impunity; the very sight, the very voice of a
Colonna, was a blight to his eye and a discord to his ear: what, then,
when a Colonna interfered with his lusts, and rebuked his vices?

“Pedant!” he cried, with quivering lips, “prate not to me of thy vain
legends and gossip’s tales! think not to snatch from me my possession
in another, when thine own life is in my hands. Unhand the maiden! throw
down thy sword! return home without further parley, or, by my faith, and
the blades of my followers--(look at them well!)--thou diest!”

“Signor,” said Adrian, calmly, yet while he spoke he retreated gradually
with his fair burthen towards the neighbouring wall, so as at least to
leave only his front exposed to those fearful odds: “Thou will not so
misuse the present chances, and wrong thyself in men’s mouths, as to
attack with eight swords even thy hereditary foe, thus cumbered, too, as
he is. But--nay hold!--if thou art so proposed, bethink thee well, one
cry of my voice would soon turn the odds against thee. Thou art now in
the quarter of my tribe; thou art surrounded by the habitations of the
Colonna: yon palace swarms with men who sleep not, save with harness
on their backs; men whom my voice can reach even now, but from whom, if
they once taste of blood, it could not save thee!”

“He speaks true, noble Lord,” said one of the band: “we have wandered
too far out of our beat; we are in their very den; the palace of old
Stephen Colonna is within call; and, to my knowledge,” added he, in
a whisper, “eighteen fresh men-of-arms--ay, and Northmen too--marched
through its gates this day.”

“Were there eight hundred men at arm’s length,” answered Martino
furiously, “I would not be thus bearded amidst mine own train! Away with
yon woman! To the attack! to the attack!”

Thus saying, he made a desperate lunge at Adrian, who, having kept his
eye cautiously on the movements of his enemy, was not unprepared for the
assault. As he put aside the blade with his own, he shouted with a loud
voice--“Colonna! to the rescue, Colonna!”

Nor had it been without an ulterior object that the acute and
self-controlling mind of Adrian had hitherto sought to prolong the
parley. Even as he first addressed Orsini, he had perceived, by the
moonlight, the glitter of armour upon two men advancing from the far end
of the street, and judged at once, by the neighbourhood, that they must
be among the mercenaries of the Colonna.

Gently he suffered the form of Irene, which now, for she had swooned
with the terror, pressed too heavily upon him, to slide from his left
arm, and standing over her form, while sheltered from behind by the wall
which he had so warily gained, he contented himself with parrying the
blows hastily aimed at him, without attempting to retaliate. Few of the
Romans, however accustomed to such desultory warfare, were then well
and dexterously practised in the use of arms; and the science Adrian had
acquired in the schools of the martial north, befriended him now, even
against such odds. It is true, indeed, that the followers of Orsini did
not share the fury of their lord; partly afraid of the consequence to
themselves should the blood of so highborn a signor be spilt by their
hands, partly embarrassed with the apprehension that they should see
themselves suddenly beset with the ruthless hirelings so close within
hearing, they struck but aimless and random blows, looking every moment
behind and aside, and rather prepared for flight than slaughter. Echoing
the cry of “Colonna,” poor Benedetta fled at the first clash of swords.
She ran down the dreary street still shrieking that cry, and passed the
very portals of Stephen’s palace (where some grim forms yet loitered)
without arresting her steps there, so great were her confusion and
terror.

Meanwhile, the two armed men, whom Adrian had descried, proceeded
leisurely up the street. The one was of a rude and common mould, his
arms and his complexion testified his calling and race; and by the great
respect he paid to his companion, it was evident that that companion was
no native of Italy. For the brigands of the north, while they served the
vices of the southern, scarce affected to disguise their contempt for
his cowardice.

The companion of the brigand was a man of a martial, yet easy air. He
wore no helmet, but a cap of crimson velvet, set off with a white plume;
on his mantle, or surcoat, which was of scarlet, was wrought a broad
white cross, both at back and breast; and so brilliant was the polish
of his corselet, that, as from time to time the mantle waved aside and
exposed it to the moonbeams, it glittered like light itself.

“Nay, Rodolf,” said he, “if thou hast so good a lot of it here with that
hoary schemer, Heaven forbid that I should wish to draw thee back again
to our merry band. But tell me--this Rienzi--thinkest thou he has any
solid and formidable power?”

“Pshaw! noble chieftain, not a whit of it. He pleases the mob; but as
for the nobles, they laugh at him; and, as for the soldiers, he has no
money!”

“He pleases the mob, then!”

“Ay, that doth he; and when he speaks aloud to them, all the roar of
Rome is hushed.”

“Humph!--when nobles are hated, and soldiers are bought, a mob may, in
any hour, become the master. An honest people and a weak mob,--a corrupt
people and a strong mob,” said the other, rather to himself than to
his comrade, and scarce, perhaps, conscious of the eternal truth of his
aphorism. “He is no mere brawler, this Rienzi, I suspect--I must see to
it. Hark! what noise is that? By the Holy Sepulchre, it is the ring of
our own metal!”

“And that cry--‘a Colonna!’” exclaimed Rodolf. “Pardon me, master,--I
must away to the rescue!”

“Ay, it is the duty of thy hire; run;--yet stay, I will accompany thee,
gratis for once, and from pure passion for mischief. By this hand, there
is no music like clashing steel!”

Still Adrian continued gallantly and unwounded to defend himself, though
his arm now grew tired, his breath well-nigh spent, and his eyes began
to wink and reel beneath the glare of the tossing torches. Orsini
himself, exhausted by his fury, had paused for an instant, fronting
his foe with a heaving breast and savage looks, when, suddenly,
his followers exclaimed, “Fly! fly!--the bandits approach--we are
surrounded!”--and two of the servitors, without further parley, took
fairly to their heels. The other five remained irresolute, and waiting
but the command of their master, when he of the white plume, whom I have
just described, thrust himself into the melee.

“What! gentles,” said he, “have ye finished already? Nay, let us not
mar the sport; begin again, I beseech you. What are the odds? Ho! six
to one!--nay, no wonder that ye have waited for fairer play. See, we two
will take the weaker side. Now then, let us begin again.”

“Insolent!” cried the Orsini. “Knowest thou him whom thou addressest
thus arrogantly?--I am Martino di Porto. Who art thou?”

“Walter de Montreal, gentleman of Provence, and Knight of St. John!”
 answered the other, carelessly.

At that redoubted name--the name of one of the boldest warriors, and of
the most accomplished freebooter of his time--even Martino’s cheek grew
pale, and his followers uttered a cry of terror.

“And this, my comrade,” continued the Knight, “for we may as well
complete the introduction, is probably better known to you than I am,
gentles of Rome; and you doubtless recognize in him Rodolf of Saxony, a
brave man and a true, where he is properly paid for his services.”

“Signor,” said Adrian to his enemy, who, aghast and dumb, remained
staring vacantly at the two new-comers, “you are now in my power. See,
our own people, too, are approaching.”

And, indeed, from the palace of Stephen Colonna, torches began to blaze,
and armed men were seen rapidly advancing to the spot.

“Go home in peace, and if, tomorrow, or any day more suitable to thee,
thou wilt meet me alone, and lance to lance, as is the wont of the
knights of the empire; or with band to band, and man for man, as is
rather the Roman custom; I will not fail thee--there is my gage.”

“Nobly spoken,” said Montreal; “and, if ye choose the latter, by your
leave, I will be one of the party.”

Martino answered not; he took up the glove, thrust it in his bosom, and
strode hastily away; only, when he had got some paces down the street,
he turned back, and, shaking his clenched hand at Adrian, exclaimed, in
a voice trembling with impotent rage--“Faithful to death!”

The words made one of the mottoes of the Orsini; and, whatever its
earlier signification, had long passed into a current proverb, to
signify their hatred to the Colonna.

Adrian, now engaged in raising, and attempting to revive Irene, who was
still insensible, disdainfully left it to Montreal to reply.

“I doubt not, Signor,” said the latter, coolly, “that thou wilt be
faithful to Death: for Death, God wot, is the only contract which men,
however ingenious, are unable to break or evade.”

“Pardon me, gentle Knight,” said Adrian, looking up from his charge, “if
I do not yet give myself wholly to gratitude. I have learned enough of
knighthood to feel thou wilt acknowledge that my first duty is here--”

“Oh, a lady, then, was the cause of the quarrel! I need not ask who
was in the right, when a man brings to the rivalry such odds as yon
caitiff.”

“Thou mistakest a little, Sir Knight,--it is but a lamb I have rescued
from the wolf.”

“For thy own table! Be it so!” returned the Knight, gaily.

Adrian smiled gravely, and shook his head in denial. In truth, he was
somewhat embarrassed by his situation. Though habitually gallant, he was
not willing to expose to misconstruction the disinterestedness of his
late conduct, and (for it was his policy to conciliate popularity) to
sully the credit which his bravery would give him among the citizens,
by conveying Irene (whose beauty, too, as yet, he had scarcely noted)
to his own dwelling; and yet, in her present situation, there was no
alternative. She evinced no sign of life. He knew not her home, nor
parentage. Benedetta had vanished. He could not leave her in the
streets; he could not resign her to the care of another; and, as she lay
now upon his breast, he felt her already endeared to him, by that sense
of protection which is so grateful to the human heart. He briefly,
therefore, explained to those now gathered round him, his present
situation, and the cause of the past conflict; and bade the
torch-bearers precede him to his home.

“You, Sir Knight,” added he, turning to Montreal, “if not already more
pleasantly lodged, will, I trust, deign to be my guest?”

“Thanks, Signor,” answered Montreal, maliciously, “but I, also, perhaps,
have my own affairs to watch over. Adieu! I shall seek you at the
earliest occasion. Fair night, and gentle dreams!


  ‘Robers Bertrams qui estoit tors Mais a ceval estoit mult fors
  Cil avoit o lui grans effors Multi ot ‘homes per lui mors.’”

     (“An ill-favoured man, but a stout horseman, was Robert
     Bertram. Great deeds were his, and many a man died by his
     hand.”)


And, muttering this rugged chant from the old “Roman de Rou,” the
Provencal, followed by Rodolf, pursued his way.

The vast extent of Rome, and the thinness of its population, left many
of the streets utterly deserted. The principal nobles were thus
enabled to possess themselves of a wide range of buildings, which they
fortified, partly against each other, partly against the people; their
numerous relatives and clients lived around them, forming, as it were,
petty courts and cities in themselves.

Almost opposite to the principal palace of the Colonna (occupied by his
powerful kinsman, Stephen) was the mansion of Adrian. Heavily swung back
the massive gates at his approach; he ascended the broad staircase, and
bore his charge into an apartment which his tastes had decorated in a
fashion not as yet common in that age. Ancient statues and busts were
arranged around; the pictured arras of Lombardy decorated the walls, and
covered the massive seats.

“What ho! Lights here, and wine!” cried the Seneschal.

“Leave us alone,” said Adrian, gazing passionately on the pale cheek of
Irene, as he now, by the clear light, beheld all its beauty; and a sweet
yet burning hope crept into his heart.



Chapter 1.V. The Description of a Conspirator, and the Dawn of the
Conspiracy.

Alone, by a table covered with various papers, sat a man in the prime
of life. The chamber was low and long; many antique and disfigured
bas-reliefs and torsos were placed around the wall, interspersed, here
and there, with the short sword and close casque, time-worn relics of
the prowess of ancient Rome. Right above the table at which he sate, the
moonlight streamed through a high and narrow casement, deep sunk in the
massy wall. In a niche to the right of this window, guarded by a sliding
door, which was now partially drawn aside--but which, by its solid
substance, and the sheet of iron with which it was plated, testified how
valuable, in the eyes of the owner, was the treasure it protected--were
ranged some thirty or forty volumes, then deemed no inconsiderable
library; and being, for the most part, the laborious copies in
manuscript by the hand of the owner, from immortal originals.

Leaning his cheek on his hand, his brow somewhat knit, his lip slightly
compressed, that personage, indulged in meditations far other than the
indolent dreams of scholars. As the high and still moonlight shone upon
his countenance, it gave an additional and solemn dignity to features
which were naturally of a grave and majestic cast. Thick and auburn
hair, the colour of which, not common to the Romans, was ascribed to his
descent from the Teuton emperor, clustered in large curls above a high
and expansive forehead; and even the present thoughtful compression of
the brow could not mar the aspect of latent power, which it derived from
that great breadth between the eyes, in which the Grecian sculptors of
old so admirably conveyed the expression of authority, and the silent
energy of command. But his features were not cast in the Grecian, still
less in the Teuton mould. The iron jaw, the aquiline nose, the somewhat
sunken cheek, strikingly recalled the character of the hard Roman
race, and might not inaptly have suggested to a painter a model for the
younger Brutus.

The marked outline of the face, and the short, firm upper lip, were not
concealed by the beard and mustachios usually then worn; and, in the
faded portrait of the person now described, still extant at Rome, may
be traced a certain resemblance to the popular pictures of Napoleon;
not indeed in the features, which are more stern and prominent in the
portrait of the Roman, but in that peculiar expression of concentrated
and tranquil power which so nearly realizes the ideal of intellectual
majesty. Though still young, the personal advantages most peculiar to
youth,--the bloom and glow, the rounded cheek in which care has not yet
ploughed its lines, the full unsunken eye, and the slender delicacy of
frame,--these were not the characteristics of that solitary student.
And, though considered by his contemporaries as eminently handsome, the
judgment was probably formed less from the more vulgar claims to such
distinction, than from the height of the stature, an advantage at that
time more esteemed than at present, and that nobler order of beauty
which cultivated genius and commanding character usually stamp upon even
homely features;--the more rare in an age so rugged.

The character of Rienzi (for the youth presented to the reader in the
first chapter of this history is now again before him in maturer years)
had acquired greater hardness and energy with each stepping-stone
to power. There was a circumstance attendant on his birth which had,
probably, exercised great and early influence on his ambition. Though
his parents were in humble circumstances, and of lowly calling, his
father was the natural son of the Emperor, Henry VII.; (De Sade supposes
that the mother of Rienzi was the daughter of an illegitimate son of
Henry VII., supporting his opinion from a MS. in the Vatican. But,
according to the contemporaneous biographer, Rienzi, in addressing
Charles, king of Bohemia claims the relationship from his father “Di
vostro legnaggio sono--figlio di bastardo d’Enrico imperatore,” &c. A
more recent writer, il Padre Gabrini, cites an inscription in support of
this descent: “Nicolaus Tribunus...Laurentii Teutonici Filius,” &c.)
and it was the pride of the parents that probably gave to Rienzi
the unwonted advantages of education. This pride transmitted to
himself,--his descent from royalty dinned into his ear, infused into his
thoughts, from his cradle,--made him, even in his earliest youth, deem
himself the equal of the Roman signors, and half unconsciously aspire
to be their superior. But, as the literature of Rome was unfolded to
his eager eye and ambitious heart, he became imbued with that pride of
country which is nobler than the pride of birth; and, save when stung by
allusions to his origin, he unaffectedly valued himself more on being
a Roman plebeian than the descendant of a Teuton king. His brother’s
death, and the vicissitudes he himself had already undergone, deepened
the earnest and solemn qualities of his character; and, at length, all
the faculties of a very uncommon intellect were concentrated into one
object--which borrowed from a mind strongly and mystically religious,
as well as patriotic, a sacred aspect, and grew at once a duty and a
passion.

“Yes,” said Rienzi, breaking suddenly from his revery, “yes, the day
is at hand when Rome shall rise again from her ashes; Justice shall
dethrone Oppression; men shall walk safe in their ancient Forum. We will
rouse from his forgotten tomb the indomitable soul of Cato! There shall
be a people once more in Rome! And I--I shall be the instrument of that
triumph--the restorer of my race! mine shall be the first voice to swell
the battle-cry of freedom--mine the first hand to rear her banner--yes,
from the height of my own soul as from a mountain, I see already rising
the liberties and the grandeur of the New Rome; and on the corner-stone
of the mighty fabric posterity shall read my name.”

Uttering these lofty boasts, the whole person of the speaker seemed
instinct with his ambition. He strode the gloomy chamber with light and
rapid steps, as if on air; his breast heaved, his eyes glowed. He felt
that love itself can scarcely bestow a rapture equal to that which is
felt, in his first virgin enthusiasm, by a patriot who knows himself
sincere!

There was a slight knock at the door, and a servitor, in the rich
liveries worn by the pope’s officials, (Not the present hideous
habiliments, which are said to have been the invention of Michael
Angelo.) presented himself.

“Signor,” said he, “my Lord, the Bishop of Orvietto, is without.”

“Ha! that is fortunate. Lights there!--My Lord, this is an honour which
I can estimate better than express.”

“Tut, tut! my good friend,” said the Bishop, entering, and seating
himself familiarly, “no ceremonies between the servants of the Church;
and never, I ween well, had she greater need of true friends than now.
These unholy tumults, these licentious contentions, in the very shrines
and city of St. Peter, are sufficient to scandalize all Christendom.”

“And so will it be,” said Rienzi, “until his Holiness himself shall
be graciously persuaded to fix his residence in the seat of his
predecessors, and curb with a strong arm the excesses of the nobles.”

“Alas, man!” said the Bishop, “thou knowest that these words are but as
wind; for were the Pope to fulfil thy wishes, and remove from Avignon to
Rome, by the blood of St. Peter! he would not curb the nobles, but
the nobles would curb him. Thou knowest well that until his blessed
predecessor, of pious memory, conceived the wise design of escaping
to Avignon, the Father of the Christian world was but like many other
fathers in their old age, controlled and guarded by his rebellious
children. Recollectest thou not how the noble Boniface himself, a man of
great heart, and nerves of iron, was kept in thraldom by the ancestors
of the Orsini--his entrances and exits made but at their will--so that,
like a caged eagle, he beat himself against his bars and died? Verily,
thou talkest of the memories of Rome--these are not the memories that
are very attractive to popes.”

“Well,” said Rienzi, laughing gently, and drawing his seat nearer to the
Bishop’s, “my Lord has certainly the best of the argument at present;
and I must own, that strong, licentious, and unhallowed as the order of
nobility was then, it is yet more so now.”

“Even I,” rejoined Raimond, colouring as he spoke, “though Vicar of the
Pope, and representative of his spiritual authority, was, but three days
ago, subjected to a coarse affront from that very Stephen Colonna, who
has ever received such favour and tenderness from the Holy See. His
servitors jostled mine in the open streets, and I myself,--I, the
delegate of the sire of kings--was forced to draw aside to the wall,
and wait until the hoary insolent swept by. Nor were blaspheming words
wanting to complete the insult. ‘Pardon, Lord Bishop,’ said he, as
he passed me; ‘but this world, thou knowest, must necessarily take
precedence of the other.’”

“Dared he so high?” said Rienzi, shading his face with his hand, as a
very peculiar smile--scarcely itself joyous, though it made others gay,
and which completely changed the character of his face, naturally grave
even to sternness--played round his lips. “Then it is time for thee,
holy father, as for us, to--”

“To what?” interrupted the Bishop, quickly. “Can we effect aught!
Dismiss thy enthusiastic dreamings--descend to the real earth--look
soberly round us. Against men so powerful, what can we do?”

“My Lord,” answered Rienzi, gravely, “it is the misfortune of signors of
your rank never to know the people, or the accurate signs of the time.
As those who pass over the heights of mountains see the clouds sweep
below, veiling the plains and valleys from their gaze, while they, only
a little above the level, survey the movements and the homes of men;
even so from your lofty eminence ye behold but the indistinct and sullen
vapours--while from my humbler station I see the preparations of the
shepherds, to shelter themselves and herds from the storm which those
clouds betoken. Despair not, my Lord; endurance goes but to a certain
limit--to that limit it is already stretched; Rome waits but the
occasion (it will soon come, but not suddenly) to rise simultaneously
against her oppressors.”

The great secret of eloquence is to be in earnest--the great secret of
Rienzi’s eloquence was in the mightiness of his enthusiasm. He never
spoke as one who doubted of success. Perhaps, like most men who
undertake high and great actions, he himself was never thoroughly aware
of the obstacles in his way. He saw the end, bright and clear, and
overleaped, in the vision of his soul, the crosses and the length of
the path; thus the deep convictions of his own mind stamped themselves
irresistibly upon others. He seemed less to promise than to prophesy.

The Bishop of Orvietto, not over wise, yet a man of cool temperament
and much worldly experience, was forcibly impressed by the energy of his
companion; perhaps, indeed, the more so, inasmuch as his own pride and
his own passions were also enlisted against the arrogance and licence of
the nobles. He paused ere he replied to Rienzi.

“But is it,” he asked, at length, “only the plebeians who will rise?
Thou knowest how they are caitiff and uncertain.”

“My Lord,” answered Rienzi, “judge, by one fact, how strongly I am
surrounded by friends of no common class: thou knowest how loudly
I speak against the nobles--I cite them by their name--I beard the
Savelli, the Orsini, the Colonna, in their very hearing. Thinkest thou
that they forgive me? thinkest thou that, were only the plebeians my
safeguard and my favourers, they would not seize me by open force,--that
I had not long ere this found a gag in their dungeons, or been swallowed
up in the eternal dumbness of the grave? Observe,” continued he, as,
reading the Vicar’s countenance, he perceived the impression he had
made--“observe, that, throughout the whole world, a great revolution has
begun. The barbaric darkness of centuries has been broken; the Knowledge
which made men as demigods in the past time has been called from her
urn; a Power, subtler than brute force, and mightier than armed men, is
at work; we have begun once more to do homage to the Royalty of Mind.
Yes, that same Power which, a few years ago, crowned Petrarch in the
Capitol, when it witnessed, after the silence of twelve centuries, the
glories of a Triumph,--which heaped upon a man of obscure birth, and
unknown in arms, the same honours given of old to emperors and the
vanquishers of kings,--which united in one act of homage even the rival
houses of Colonna and Orsini,--which made the haughtiest patricians
emulous to bear the train, to touch but the purple robe, of the son of
the Florentine plebeian,--which still draws the eyes of Europe to
the lowly cottage of Vaucluse,--which gives to the humble student the
all-acknowledged licence to admonish tyrants, and approach, with haughty
prayers, even the Father of the Church;--yes, that same Power, which,
working silently throughout Italy, murmurs under the solid base of
the Venetian oligarchy; (It was about eight years afterwards that the
long-smothered hate of the Venetian people to that wisest and most
vigilant of all oligarchies, the Sparta of Italy, broke out in the
conspiracy under Marino Faliero.) which, beyond the Alps, has wakened
into visible and sudden life in Spain, in Germany, in Flanders; and
which, even in that barbarous Isle, conquered by the Norman sword, ruled
by the bravest of living kings, (Edward III., in whose reign opinions
far more popular than those of the following century began to work. The
Civil Wars threw back the action into the blood. It was indeed an age
throughout the world which put forth abundant blossoms, but crude and
unripened fruit;--a singular leap, followed by as singular a pause.)
has roused a spirit Norman cannot break--kings to rule over must rule
by--yes, that same Power is everywhere abroad: it speaks, it conquers in
the voice even of him who is before you; it unites in his cause all on
whom but one glimmering of light has burst, all in whom one generous
desire can be kindled! Know, Lord Vicar, that there is not a man in
Rome, save our oppressors themselves--not a man who has learned one
syllable of our ancient tongue--whose heart and sword are not with me.
The peaceful cultivators of letters--the proud nobles of the second
order--the rising race, wiser than their slothful sires; above all, my
Lord, the humbler ministers of religion, priests and monks, whom luxury
hath not blinded, pomp hath not deafened, to the monstrous outrage to
Christianity daily and nightly perpetrated in the Christian Capital;
these,--all these,--are linked with the merchant and the artisan in one
indissoluble bond, waiting but the signal to fall or to conquer, to live
freemen, or to die martyrs, with Rienzi and their country!”

“Sayest thou so in truth?” said the Bishop, startled, and half rising.
“Prove but thy words, and thou shalt not find the ministers of God are
less eager than their lay brethren for the happiness of men.”

“What I say,” rejoined Rienzi, in a cooler tone, “that can I show; but I
may only prove it to those who will be with us.”

“Fear me not,” answered Raimond: “I know well the secret mind of his
Holiness, whose delegate and representative I am; and could he see but
the legitimate and natural limit set to the power of the patricians,
who, in their arrogance, have set at nought the authority of the Church
itself, be sure that he would smile on the hand that drew the line.
Nay, so certain of this am I, that if ye succeed, I, his responsible but
unworthy vicar, will myself sanction the success. But beware of crude
attempts; the Church must not be weakened by linking itself to failure.”

“Right, my Lord,” answered Rienzi; “and in this, the policy of religion
is that of freedom. Judge of my prudence by my long delay. He who can
see all around him impatient--himself not less so--and yet suppress the
signal, and bide the hour, is not likely to lose his cause by rashness.”

“More, then, of this anon,” said the Bishop, resettling himself in his
seat. “As thy plans mature, fear not to communicate with me. Believe
that Rome has no firmer friend then he who, ordained to preserve order,
finds himself impotent against aggression. Meanwhile, to the object of
my present visit, which links itself, in some measure, perhaps, with the
topics on which we have conversed...Thou knowest that when his Holiness
intrusted thee with thy present office, he bade thee also announce his
beneficent intention of granting a general Jubilee at Rome for the year
1350--a most admirable design for two reasons, sufficiently apparent
to thyself: first, that every Christian soul that may undertake the
pilgrimage to Rome on that occasion, may thus obtain a general remission
of sins; and secondly, because, to speak carnally, the concourse of
pilgrims so assembled, usually, by the donations and offerings their
piety suggests, very materially add to the revenues of the Holy See:
at this time, by the way, in no very flourishing condition. This thou
knowest, dear Rienzi.”

Rienzi bowed his head in assent, and the prelate continued--

“Well, it is with the greatest grief that his Holiness perceives that
his pious intentions are likely to be frustrated: for so fierce and
numerous are now the brigands in the public approaches to Rome, that,
verily, the boldest pilgrim may tremble a little to undertake the
journey; and those who do so venture will, probably, be composed of the
poorest of the Christian community,--men who, bringing with them neither
gold, nor silver, nor precious offerings, will have little to fear from
the rapacity of the brigands. Hence arise two consequences: on the
one hand, the rich--whom, Heaven knows, and the Gospel has, indeed,
expressly declared, have the most need of a remission of sins--will be
deprived of this glorious occasion for absolution; and, on the other
hand, the coffers of the Church will be impiously defrauded of that
wealth which it would otherwise doubtless obtain from the zeal of her
children.”

“Nothing can be more logically manifest, my Lord,” said Rienzi.

The Vicar continued--“Now, in letters received five days since from his
Holiness, he bade me expose these fearful consequences to Christianity
to the various patricians who are legitimately fiefs of the Church, and
command their resolute combination against the marauders of the road.
With these have I conferred, and vainly.”

“For by the aid, and from the troops, of those very brigands, these
patricians have fortified their palaces against each other,” added
Rienzi.

“Exactly for that reason,” rejoined the Bishop. “Nay, Stephen Colonna
himself had the audacity to confess it. Utterly unmoved by the loss to
so many precious souls, and, I may add, to the papal treasury, which
ought to be little less dear to right-discerning men, they refuse
to advance a step against the bandits. Now, then, hearken the second
mandate of his Holiness:--‘Failing the nobles,’ saith he, in his
prophetic sagacity, ‘confer with Cola di Rienzi. He is a bold man, and a
pious, and, thou tellest me, of great weight with the people; and say to
him, that if his wit can devise the method for extirpating these sons
of Belial, and rendering a safe passage along the public ways, largely,
indeed, will he merit at our hands,--lasting will be the gratitude we
shall owe to him; and whatever succour thou, and the servants of our
See, can render to him, let it not be stinted.’”

“Said his Holiness thus!” exclaimed Rienzi. “I ask no more--the
gratitude is mine that he hath thought thus of his servant, and
intrusted me with this charge; at once I accept it--at once I pledge
myself to success. Let us, my Lord, let us, then, clearly understand
the limits ordained to my discretion. To curb the brigands without the
walls, I must have authority over those within. If I undertake, at peril
of my life, to clear all the avenues to Rome of the robbers who now
infest it, shall I have full licence for conduct bold, peremptory, and
severe?”

“Such conduct the very nature of the charge demands,” replied Raimond.

“Ay,--even though it be exercised against the arch offenders--against
the supporters of the brigands--against the haughtiest of the nobles
themselves?”

The Bishop paused, and looked hard in the face of the speaker. “I
repeat,” said he, at length, sinking his voice, and with a significant
tone, “in these bold attempts, success is the sole sanction. Succeed,
and we will excuse thee all--even to the--”

“Death of a Colonna or an Orsini, should justice demand it; and provided
it be according to the law, and only incurred by the violation of the
law!” added Rienzi, firmly.

The Bishop did not reply in words, but a slight motion of his head was
sufficient answer to Rienzi.

“My Lord,” said he, “from this time, then, all is well; I date the
revolution--the restoration of order, of the state--from this hour, this
very conference. Till now, knowing that justice must never wink upon
great offenders, I had hesitated, through fear lest thou and his
Holiness might deem it severity, and blame him who replaces the law,
because he smites the violaters of law. Now I judge ye more rightly.
Your hand, my Lord.”

The Bishop extended his hand; Rienzi grasped it firmly, and then raised
it respectfully to his lips. Both felt that the compact was sealed.

This conference, so long in recital, was short in the reality; but its
object was already finished, and the Bishop rose to depart. The outer
portal of the house was opened, the numerous servitors of the Bishop
held on high their torches, and he had just termed from Rienzi, who
had attended him to the gate, when a female passed hastily through the
Prelate’s train, and starting as she beheld Rienzi, flung herself at his
feet.

“Oh, hasten, Sir! hasten, for the love of God, hasten! or the young
Signora is lost for ever!”

“The Signora!--Heaven and earth, Benedetta, of whom do you speak?--of my
sister--of Irene? is she not within?”

“Oh, Sir--the Orsini--the Orsini!”

“What of them?--speak, woman!”

Here, breathlessly, and with many a break, Benedetta recounted to
Rienzi, in whom the reader has already recognised the brother of Irene,
so far of the adventure with Martino di Porto as she had witnessed: of
the termination and result of the contest she knew nought.

Rienzi listened in silence; but the deadly paleness of his countenance,
and the writhing of the nether lip, testified the emotions to which he
gave no audible vent.

“You hear, my Lord Bishop--you hear,” said he, when Benedetta had
concluded; and turning to the Bishop, whose departure the narrative had
delayed--“you hear to what outrage the citizens of Rome are subjected.
My hat and sword! instantly! My Lord, forgive my abruptness.”

“Whither art thou bent, then?” asked Raimond.

“Whither--whither!--Ay, I forgot, my Lord, you have no sister. Perhaps
too, you had no brother?--No, no; one victim at least I will live to
save. Whither, you ask me?--to the palace of Martino di Porto.”

“To an Orsini alone, and for justice?”

“Alone, and for justice!--No!” shouted Rienzi, in a loud voice, as he
seized his sword, now brought to him by one of his servants, and rushed
from the house; “but one man is sufficient for revenge!”

The Bishop paused for a moment’s deliberation. “He must not be lost,”
 muttered he, “as he well may be, if exposed thus solitary to the wolf’s
rage. What, ho!” he cried aloud; “advance the torches!--quick, quick! We
ourself--we, the Vicar of the Pope--will see to this. Calm yourselves,
good people; your young Signora shall be restored. On! to the palace of
Martino di Porto!”



Chapter 1.VI. Irene in the Palace of Adrian di Castello.

As the Cyprian gazed on the image in which he had embodied a youth of
dreams, what time the living hues flushed slowly beneath the marble,--so
gazed the young and passionate Adrian upon the form reclined before him,
re-awakening gradually to life. And, if the beauty of that face were
not of the loftiest or the most dazzling order, if its soft and quiet
character might be outshone by many, of loveliness less really perfect,
yet never was there a countenance that, to some eyes, would have seemed
more charming, and never one in which more eloquently was wrought that
ineffable and virgin expression which Italian art seeks for in its
models,--in which modesty is the outward, and tenderness the latent,
expression; the bloom of youth, both of form and heart, ere the first
frail and delicate freshness of either is brushed away: and when even
love itself, the only unquiet visitant that should be known at such an
age, is but a sentiment, and not a passion!

“Benedetta!” murmured Irene, at length opening her eyes, unconsciously,
upon him who knelt beside her,--eyes of that uncertain, that most liquid
hue, on which you might gaze for years and never learn the secret of the
colour, so changed it with the dilating pupil,--darkening in the shade,
and brightening into azure in the light:

“Benedetta,” said Irene, “where art thou? Oh, Benedetta! I have had such
a dream.”

“And I, too, such a vision!” thought Adrian.

“Where am I?” cried Irene, rising from the couch. “This room--these
hangings--Holy Virgin! do I dream still!--and you! Heavens!--it is the
Lord Adrian di Castello!”

“Is that a name thou hast been taught to fear?” said Adrian; “if so, I
will forswear it.”

If Irene now blushed deeply, it was not in that wild delight with which
her romantic heart motive foretold that she would listen to the
first words of homage from Adrian di Castello. Bewildered and
confused,--terrified at the strangeness of the place and shrinking even
from the thought of finding herself alone with one who for years had
been present to her fancies,--alarm and distress were the emotions
she felt the most, and which most were impressed upon her speaking
countenance; and as Adrian now drew nearer to her, despite the
gentleness of his voice and the respect of his looks, her fears, not the
less strong that they were vague, increased upon her: she retreated to
the further end of the room, looked wildly round her, and then, covering
her face with her hands, burst into a paroxysm of tears.

Moved himself by these tears, and divining her thoughts, Adrian forgot
for moment all the more daring wishes he had formed.

“Fear not, sweet lady,” said he, earnestly: “recollect thyself, I
beseech thee; no peril, no evil can reach thee here; it was this hand
that saved thee from the outrage of the Orsini--this roof is but the
shelter of a friend! Tell me, then, fair wonder, thy name and residence,
and I will summon my servitors, and guard thee to thy home at once.”

Perhaps the relief of tears, even more than Adrian’s words, restored
Irene to herself, and enabled her to comprehend her novel situation;
and as her senses, thus cleared, told her what she owed to him whom her
dreams had so long imaged as the ideal of all excellence, she recovered
her self-possession, and uttered her thanks with a grace not the less
winning, if it still partook of embarrassment.

“Thank me not,” answered Adrian, passionately. “I have touched thy
hand--I am repaid. Repaid! nay, all gratitude--all homage is for me to
render!”

Blushing again, but with far different emotions than before, Irene,
after a momentary pause, replied, “Yet, my Lord, I must consider it a
debt the more weighty that you speak of it so lightly. And now, complete
the obligation. I do not see my companion--suffer her to accompany me
home; it is but a short way hence.”

“Blessed, then, is the air that I have breathed so unconsciously!” said
Adrian. “But thy companion, dear lady, is not here. She fled, I imagine,
in the confusion of the conflict; and not knowing thy name, nor being
able, in thy then state, to learn it from thy lips, it was my happy
necessity to convey thee hither;--but I will be thy companion. Nay, why
that timid glance? my people, also, shall attend us.”

“My thanks, noble Lord, are of little worth; my brother, who is not
unknown to thee, will thank thee more fittingly. May I depart?” and
Irene, as she spoke, was already at the door.

“Art thou so eager to leave me?” answered Adrian, sadly. “Alas! when
thou hast departed from my eyes, it will seem as if the moon had left
the night!--but it is happiness to obey thy wishes, even though they
tear thee from me.”

A slight smile parted Irene’s lips, and Adrian’s heart beat audibly
to himself, as he drew from that smile, and those downcast eyes, no
unfavourable omen.

Reluctantly and slowly he turned towards the door, and summoned his
attendants. “But,” said he, as they stood on the lofty staircase, “thou
sayest, sweet lady, that thy brother’s name is not unknown to me. Heaven
grant that he be, indeed, a friend of the Colonna!”

“His boast,” answered Irene, evasively; “the boast of Cola di Rienzi is,
to be a friend to the friends of Rome.”

“Holy Virgin of Ara Coeli!--is thy brother that extraordinary man?”
 exclaimed Adrian, as he foresaw, at the mention of that name, a barrier
to his sudden passion. “Alas! in a Colonna, in a noble, he will see no
merit; even though thy fortunate deliverer, sweet maiden, sought to be
his early friend!”

“Thou wrongest him much, my Lord,” returned Irene, warmly; “he is a man
above all others to sympathize with thy generous valour, even had it
been exerted in defence of the humblest woman in Rome,--how much more,
then, when in protection of his sister!”

“The times are, indeed, diseased,” answered Adrian, thoughtfully, as
they now found themselves in the open street, “when men who alike mourn
for the woes of their country are yet suspicious of each other; when to
be a patrician is to be regarded as an enemy to the people; when to
be termed the friend of the people is to be considered a foe to the
patricians: but come what may, oh! let me hope, dear lady, that no
doubts, no divisions, shall banish from thy breast one gentle memory of
me!”

“Ah! little, little do you know me!” began Irene, and stopped suddenly
short.

“Speak! speak again!--of what music has this envious silence deprived my
soul! Thou wilt not, then, forget me? And,” continued Adrian, “we shall
meet again? It is to Rienzi’s house we are bound now; tomorrow I shall
visit my old companion,--tomorrow I shall see thee. Will it not be so?”

In Irene’s silence was her answer.

“And as thou hast told me thy brother’s name, make it sweet to my ear,
and add to it thine own.”

“They call me Irene.”

“Irene, Irene!--let me repeat it. It is a soft name, and dwells upon the
lips as if loath to leave them--a fitting name for one like thee.”

Thus making his welcome court to Irene, in that flowered and glowing
language which, if more peculiar to that age and to the gallantry of
the south, is also the language in which the poetry of youthful passion
would, in all times and lands, utter its rich extravagance, could heart
speak to heart, Adrian conveyed homeward his beautiful charge, taking,
however, the most circuitous and lengthened route; an artifice which
Irene either perceived not, or silently forgave. They were now within
sight of the street in which Rienzi dwelt, when a party of men bearing
torches, came unexpectedly upon them. It was the train of the Bishop of
Orvietto, returning from the palace of Martino di Porto, and in their
way (accompanied by Rienzi) to that of Adrian. They had learned at the
former, without an interview with the Orsini, from the retainers in
the court below, the fortune of the conflict, and the name of Irene’s
champion; and, despite Adrian’s general reputation for gallantry, Rienzi
knew enough of his character, and the nobleness of his temper, to feel
assured that Irene was safe in his protection. Alas! in that very safety
to the person is often the most danger to the heart. Woman never so
dangerously loves, as when he who loves her, for her sake, subdues
himself.

Clasped to her brother’s breast, Irene bade him thank her deliverer;
and Rienzi, with that fascinating frankness which sits so well on those
usually reserved, and which all who would rule the hearts of their
fellow-men must at times command, advanced to the young Colonna, and
poured forth his gratitude and praise.

“We have been severed too long,--we must know each other again,” replied
Adrian. “I shall seek thee, ere long, be assured.”

Turning to take his leave of Irene, he conveyed her hand to his lips,
and pressing it, as it dropped from his clasp, was he deceived in
thinking that those delicate fingers lightly, involuntarily, returned
the pressure?



Chapter 1.VII. Upon Love and Lovers.

If, in adopting the legendary love tale of Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare
had changed the scene in which it is cast for a more northern clime, we
may doubt whether the art of Shakespeare himself could have reconciled
us at once to the suddenness and the strength of Juliet’s passion. And,
even as it is, perhaps there are few of our rational and sober-minded
islanders who would not honestly confess, if fairly questioned, that
they deem the romance and fervour of those ill-starred lovers of Verona
exaggerated and over-drawn. Yet, in Italy, the picture of that affection
born of a night--but “strong as death”--is one to which the veriest
commonplaces of life would afford parallels without number. As in
different ages, so in different climes, love varies wonderfully in the
shapes it takes. And even at this day, beneath Italian skies, many a
simple girl would feel as Juliet, and many a homely gallant would rival
the extravagance of Romeo. Long suits in that sunny land, wherein, as
whereof, I now write, are unknown. In no other land, perhaps, is there
found so commonly the love at first sight, which in France is a jest,
and in England a doubt; in no other land, too, is love, though so
suddenly conceived, more faithfully preserved. That which is ripened
in fancy comes at once to passion, yet is embalmed through all time by
sentiment. And this must be my and their excuse, if the love of
Adrian some too prematurely formed, and that of Irene too romantically
conceived;--it is the excuse which they take from the air and sun, from
the customs of their ancestors, from the soft contagion of example.
But while they yielded to the dictates of their hearts, it was with a
certain though secret sadness--a presentiment that had, perhaps, its
charm, though it was of cross and evil. Born of so proud a race, Adrian
could scarcely dream of marriage with the sister of a plebeian; and
Irene, unconscious of the future glory of her brother, could hardly
have cherished any hope, save that of being loved. Yet these adverse
circumstances, which, in the harder, the more prudent, the more
self-denying, perhaps the more virtuous minds, that are formed beneath
the northern skies, would have been an inducement to wrestle against
love so placed, only contributed to feed and to strengthen theirs by
an opposition which has ever its attraction for romance. They found
frequent, though short, opportunities of meeting--not quite alone, but
only in the conniving presence of Benedetta: sometimes in the public
gardens, sometimes amidst the vast and deserted ruins by which the house
of Rienzi was surrounded. They surrendered themselves, without much
question of the future, to the excitement--the elysium--of the hour:
they lived but from day to day; their future was the next time they
should meet; beyond that epoch, the very mists of their youthful love
closed in obscurity and shadow which they sought not to penetrate: and
as yet they had not arrived at that period of affection when there was
danger of their fall,--their love had not passed the golden portal where
Heaven ceases and Earth begins. Everything for them was the poetry,
the vagueness, the refinement,--not the power, the concentration, the
mortality,--of desire! The look--the whisper--the brief pressure of the
hand, at most, the first kisses of love, rare and few,--these marked the
human limits of that sentiment which filled them with a new life, which
elevated them as with a new soul.

The roving tendencies of Adrian were at once fixed and centered; the
dreams of his tender mistress had awakened to a life dreaming still, but
“rounded with a truth.” All that earnestness, and energy, and fervour of
emotion, which, in her brother, broke forth in the schemes of patriotism
and the aspirations of power, were, in Irene, softened down into one
object of existence, one concentration of soul,--and that was love. Yet,
in this range of thought and action, so apparently limited, there was,
in reality, no less boundless a sphere than in the wide space of her
brother’s many-pathed ambition. Not the less had she the power and
scope for all the loftiest capacities granted to our clay. Equal was her
enthusiasm for her idol; equal, had she been equally tried, would have
been her generosity, her devotion:--greater, be sure, her courage; more
inalienable her worship; more unsullied by selfish purposes and sordid
views. Time, change, misfortune, ingratitude, would have left her the
same! What state could fall, what liberty decay, if the zeal of man’s
noisy patriotism were as pure as the silent loyalty of a woman’s love?

In them everything was young!--the heart unchilled, unblighted,--that
fulness and luxuriance of life’s life which has in it something of
divine. At that age, when it seems as if we could never die, how
deathless, how flushed and mighty as with the youngness of a god, is all
that our hearts create! Our own youth is like that of the earth itself,
when it peopled the woods and waters with divinities; when life
ran riot, and yet only gave birth to beauty;--all its shapes, of
poetry,--all its airs, the melodies of Arcady and Olympus! The Golden
Age never leaves the world: it exists still, and shall exist, till love,
health, poetry, are no more; but only for the young!

If I now dwell, though but for a moment, on this interlude in a drama
calling forth more masculine passions than that of love, it is because
I foresee that the occasion will but rarely recur. If I linger on the
description of Irene and her hidden affection, rather than wait for
circumstances to portray them better than the author’s words can, it is
because I foresee that that loving and lovely image must continue to the
last rather a shadow than a portrait,--thrown in the background, as is
the real destiny of such natures, by bolder figures and more gorgeous
colours; a something whose presence is rather felt than seen, and whose
very harmony with the whole consists in its retiring and subdued repose.



Chapter 1.VIII. The Enthusiastic Man Judged by the Discreet Man.

“Thou wrongest me,” said Rienzi, warmly, to Adrian, as they sat alone,
towards the close of a long conference; “I do not play the part of a
mere demagogue; I wish not to stir the great deeps in order that my
lees of fortune may rise to the surface. So long have I brooded over the
past, that it seems to me as if I had become a part of it--as if I
had no separate existence. I have coined my whole soul into one master
passion,--and its end is the restoration of Rome.”

“But by what means?”

“My Lord! my Lord! there is but one way to restore the greatness of a
people--it is an appeal to the people themselves. It is not in the power
of princes and barons to make a state permanently glorious; they
raise themselves, but they raise not the people with them. All great
regenerations are the universal movement of the mass.”

“Nay,” answered Adrian, “then have we read history differently. To
me, all great regenerations seem to have been the work of the few, and
tacitly accepted by the multitude. But let us not dispute after the
manner of the schools. Thou sayest loudly that a vast crisis is at hand;
that the Good Estate (buono stato) shall be established. How? where are
your arms?--your soldiers? Are the nobles less strong than heretofore?
Is the mob more bold, more constant? Heaven knows that I speak not with
the prejudices of my order--I weep for the debasement of my country! I
am a Roman, and in that name I forget that I am a noble. But I tremble
at the storm you would raise so hazardously. If your insurrection
succeed, it will be violent: it will be purchased by blood--by the blood
of all the loftiest names of Rome. You will aim at a second expulsion of
the Tarquins; but it will be more like a second proscription of Sylla.
Massacres and disorders never pave the way to peace. If, on the other
hand, you fail, the chains of Rome are riveted for ever: an ineffectual
struggle to escape is but an excuse for additional tortures to the
slave.”

“And what, then, would the Lord Adrian have us do?” said Rienzi, with
that peculiar and sarcastic smile which has before been noted. “Shall
we wait till the Colonna and Orsini quarrel no more? shall we ask the
Colonna for liberty, and the Orsini for justice? My Lord, we cannot
appeal to the nobles against the nobles. We must not ask them to
moderate their power; we must restore to ourselves that power. There may
be danger in the attempt--but we attempt it amongst the monuments of the
Forum: and if we fall--we shall perish worthy of our sires! Ye have
high descent, and sounding titles, and wide lands, and you talk of your
ancestral honours! We, too,--we plebeians of Rome,--we have ours! Our
fathers were freemen! where is our heritage? not sold--not given away:
but stolen from us, now by fraud, now by force--filched from us in
our sleep; or wrung from us with fierce hands, amidst our cries and
struggles. My Lord, we but ask that lawful heritage to be restored to
us: to us--nay, to you it is the same; your liberty, alike, is gone. Can
you dwell in your father’s house, without towers, and fortresses, and
the bought swords of bravos? can you walk in the streets at dark without
arms and followers? True, you, a noble, may retaliate; though we dare
not. You, in your turn, may terrify and outrage others; but does licence
compensate for liberty? They have given you pomp and power--but the
safety of equal laws were a better gift. Oh, were I you--were I Stephen
Colonna himself, I should pant, ay, thirstily as I do now, for that
free air which comes not through bars and bulwarks against my
fellow-citizens, but in the open space of Heaven--safe, because
protected by the silent Providence of Law, and not by the lean fears
and hollow-eyed suspicions which are the comrades of a hated power.
The tyrant thinks he is free, because he commands slaves: the meanest
peasant in a free state is more free than he is. Oh, my Lord, that
you--the brave, the generous, the enlightened--you, almost alone amidst
your order, in the knowledge that we had a country--oh, would that you
who can sympathise with our sufferings, would strike with us for their
redress!”

“Thou wilt war against Stephen Colonna, my kinsman; and though I have
seen him but little, nor, truth to say, esteem him much, yet he is the
boast of our house,--how can I join thee?”

“His life will be safe, his possessions safe, his rank safe. What do we
war against? His power to do wrong to others.”

“Should he discover that thou hast force beyond words, he would be less
merciful to thee.”

“And has he not discovered that? Do not the shouts of the people tell
him that I am a man whom he should fear? Does he--the cautious, the
wily, the profound--does he build fortresses, and erect towers, and not
see from his battlements the mighty fabric that I, too, have erected?”

“You! where, Rienzi?”

“In the hearts of Rome! Does he not see?” continued Rienzi. “No, no;
he--all, all his tribe, are blind. Is it not so?”

“Of a certainty, my kinsman has no belief in your power, else he would
have crushed you long ere this. Nay, it was but three days ago that he
said, gravely, he would rather you addressed the populace than the best
priest in Christendom; for that other orators inflamed the crowd, and no
man so stilled and dispersed them as you did.”

“And I called him profound! Does not Heaven hush the air most when
most it prepares the storm? Ay, my Lord, I understand. Stephen Colonna
despises me. I have been”--(here, as he continued, a deep blush mantled
over his cheek)--“you remember it--at his palace in my younger days,
and pleased him with witty tales and light apophthegms. Nay--ha! ha!--he
would call me, I think, sometimes, in gay compliment, his jester--his
buffoon! I have brooked his insult; I have even bowed to his applause.
I would undergo the same penance, stoop to the same shame, for the same
motive, and in the same cause. What did I desire to effect? Can you tell
me? No! I will whisper it, then, to you: it was--the contempt of Stephen
Colonna. Under that contempt I was protected, till protection became
no longer necessary. I desired not to be thought formidable by the
patricians, in order that, quietly and unsuspected, I might make my way
amongst the people. I have done so; I now throw aside the mask. Face
to face with Stephen Colonna, I could tell him, this very hour, that I
brave his anger; that I laugh at his dungeons and armed men. But if he
think me the same Rienzi as of old, let him; I can wait my hour.”

“Yet,” said Adrian, waiving an answer to the haughty language of his
companion, “tell me, what dost thou ask for the people, in order to
avoid an appeal to their passions?--ignorant and capricious as they are,
thou canst not appeal to their reason.”

“I ask full justice and safety for all men. I will be contented with no
less a compromise. I ask the nobles to dismantle their fortresses; to
disband their armed retainers; to acknowledge no impunity for crime in
high lineage; to claim no protection save in the courts of the common
law.”

“Vain desire!” said Adrian. “Ask what may yet be granted.”

“Ha--ha!” replied Rienzi, laughing bitterly, “did I not tell you it was
a vain dream to ask for law and justice at the hands of the great? Can
you blame me, then, that I ask it elsewhere?” Then, suddenly changing
his tone and manner, he added with great solemnity--“Waking life hath
false and vain dreams; but sleep is sometimes a mighty prophet. By sleep
it is that Heaven mysteriously communes with its creatures, and guides
and sustains its earthly agents in the path to which its providence
leads them on.”

Adrian made no reply. This was not the first time he had noted that
Rienzi’s strong intellect was strangely conjoined with a deep and
mystical superstition. And this yet more inclined the young noble, who,
though sufficiently devout, yielded but little to the wilder credulities
of the time, to doubt the success of the schemer’s projects. In this
he erred greatly, though his error was that of the worldly wise. For
nothing ever so inspires human daring, as the fond belief that it is the
agent of a Diviner Wisdom. Revenge and patriotism, united in one man
of genius and ambition--such are the Archimedian levers that find, in
FANATICISM, the spot out of the world by which to move the world. The
prudent man may direct a state; but it is the enthusiast who regenerates
it,--or ruins.



Chapter 1.IX. “When the People Saw this Picture, Every One Marvelled.”

Before the market-place, and at the foot of the Capitol, an immense
crowd was assembled. Each man sought to push before his neighbour; each
struggled to gain access to one particular spot, round which the crowd
was wedged think and dense.

“Corpo di Dio!” said a man of huge stature, pressing onward, like some
bulky ship, casting the noisy waves right and left from its prow, “this
is hot work; but for what, in the holy Mother’s name, do ye crowd so?
See you not, Sir Ribald, that my right arm is disabled, swathed, and
bandaged, so that I cannot help myself better than a baby? And yet you
push against me as if I were an old wall!”

“Ah, Cecco del Vecchio!--what, man! we must make way for you--you are
too small and tender to bustle through a crowd! Come, I will protect
you!” said a dwarf of some four feet high, glancing up at the giant.

“Faith,” said the grim smith, looking round on the mob, who laughed loud
at the dwarf’s proffer, “we all do want protection, big and small. What
do you laugh for, ye apes?--ay, you don’t understand parables.”

“And yet it is a parable we are come to gaze upon,” said one of the mob,
with a slight sneer.

“Pleasant day to you, Signor Baroncelli,” answered Cecco del Vecchio;
“you are a good man, and love the people; it makes one’s heart smile to
see you. What’s all this pother for?”

“Why the Pope’s Notary hath set up a great picture in the marketplace,
and the gapers say it relates to Rome; so they are melting their brains
out, this hot day, to guess at the riddle.”

“Ho! ho!” said the smith, pushing on so vigorously that he left the
speaker suddenly in the rear; “if Cola di Rienzi hath aught in the
matter, I would break through stone rocks to get to it.”

“Much good will a dead daub do us,” said Baroncelli, sourly, and turning
to his neighbours; but no man listened to him, and he, a would-be
demagogue, gnawed his lip in envy.

Amidst half-awed groans and curses from the men whom he jostled aside,
and open objurgations and shrill cries from the women, to whose robes
and headgear he showed as little respect, the sturdy smith won his way
to a space fenced round by chains, in the centre of which was placed a
huge picture.

“How came it hither?” cried one; “I was first at the market.”

“We found it here at daybreak,” said a vender of fruit: “no one was by.”

“But why do you fancy Rienzi had a hand in it?”

“Why, who else could?” answered twenty voices.

“True! Who else?” echoed the gaunt smith. “I dare be sworn the good man
spent the whole night in painting it himself. Blood of St. Peter! but it
is mighty fine! What is it about?”

“That’s the riddle,” said a meditative fish-woman; “if I could make it
out, I should die happy.”

“It is something about liberty and taxes, no doubt,” said Luigi, the
butcher, leaning over the chains. “Ah, if Rienzi were minded, every poor
man would have his bit of meat in his pot.”

“And as much bread as he could eat,” added a pale baker.

“Chut! bread and meat--everybody has that now!--but what wine the
poor folks drink! One has no encouragement to take pains with one’s
vineyard,” said a vine-dresser.

“Ho, hollo!--long life to Pandulfo di Guido! Make way for master
Pandulfo; he is a learned man; he is a friend of the great Notary’s; he
will tell us all about the picture; make way, there--make way!”

Slowly and modestly, Pandulfo di Guido, a quiet, wealthy, and honest man
of letters, whom nought save the violence of the times could have roused
from his tranquil home, or his studious closet, passed to the chains. He
looked long and hard at the picture, which was bright with new, and yet
moist colours, and exhibited somewhat of the reviving art, which,
though hard and harsh in its features, was about that time visible, and,
carried to a far higher degree, we yet gaze upon in the paintings of
Perugino, who flourished during the succeeding generation. The people
pressed round the learned man, with open mouths; now turning their eyes
to the picture, now to Pandulfo.

“Know you not,” at length said Pandulfo, “the easy and palpable meaning
of this design? Behold how the painter has presented to you a vast and
stormy sea--mark how its waves--”

“Speak louder--louder!” shouted the impatient crowd.

“Hush!” cried those in the immediate vicinity of Pandulfo, “the worthy
Signor is perfectly audible!”

Meanwhile, some of the more witty, pushing towards a stall in the
marketplace, bore from it a rough table, from which they besought
Pandulfo to address the people. The pale citizen, with some pain and
shame, for he was no practised spokesman, was obliged to assent; but
when he cast his eyes over the vast and breathless crowd, his own deep
sympathy with their cause inspired and emboldened him. A light broke
from his eyes; his voice swelled into power; and his head, usually
buried in his breast, became erect and commanding in its air.

“You see before you in the picture” (he began again) “a mighty and
tempestuous sea: upon its waves you behold five ships; four of them are
already wrecks,--their masts are broken, the waves are dashing through
the rent planks, they are past all aid and hope: on each of these ships
lies the corpse of a woman. See you not, in the wan face and livid
limbs, how faithfully the limner hath painted the hues and loathsomeness
of death? Below each of these ships is a word that applies the metaphor
to truth. Yonder, you see the name of Carthage; the other three are
Troy, Jerusalem, and Babylon. To these four is one common inscription.
‘To exhaustion were we brought by injustice!’ Turn now your eyes to the
middle of the sea,--there you behold the fifth ship, tossed amidst the
waves, her mast broken, her rudder gone, her sails shivered, but not
yet a wreck like the rest, though she soon may be. On her deck kneels
a female, clothed in mourning; mark the wo upon her countenance,--how
cunningly the artist has conveyed its depth and desolation; she
stretches out her arms in prayer, she implores your and Heaven’s
assistance. Mark now the superscription--‘This is Rome!’--Yes, it is
your country that addresses you in this emblem!”

The crowd waved to and fro, and a deep murmur crept gathering over the
silence which they had hitherto kept.

“Now,” continued Pandulfo, “turn your gaze to the right of the picture,
and you will behold the cause of the tempest,--you will see why the
fifth vessel is thus perilled, and her sisters are thus wrecked. Mark,
four different kinds of animals, who, from their horrid jaws, send forth
the winds and storms which torture and rack the sea. The first are the
lions, the wolves, the bears. These, the inscription tells you, are
the lawless and savage signors of the state. The next are the dogs
and swine,--these are the evil counsellors and parasites. Thirdly,
you behold the dragons and the foxes,--and these are false judges and
notaries, and they who sell justice. Fourthly, in the hares, the goats,
the apes, that assist in creating the storm, you perceive, by the
inscription, the emblems of the popular thieves and homicides, ravishers
and spoliators. Are ye bewildered still, O Romans! or have ye mastered
the riddle of the picture?”

Far in their massive palaces the Savelli and Orsini heard the echo of
the shouts that answered the question of Pandulfo.

“Are ye, then, without hope!” resumed the scholar, as the shout ceased,
and hushing, with the first sound of his voice, the ejaculations and
speeches which each man had turned to utter to his neighbour. “Are ye
without hope? Doth the picture, which shows your tribulation, promise
you no redemption? Behold, above that angry sea, the heavens open, and
the majesty of God descends gloriously, as to judgment: and, from the
rays that surround the Spirit of God extend two flaming swords, and
on those swords stand, in wrath, but in deliverance, the two patron
saints--the two mighty guardians of your city! People of Rome, farewell!
The parable is finished.” (M. Sismondi attributes to Rienzi a fine
oration at the showing of the picture, in which he thundered against
the vices of the patricians. The contemporary biographer of Rienzi
says nothing of this harangue. But, apparently (since history has its
liberties as well as fiction), M. Sismondi has thought it convenient to
confound two occasions very distinct in themselves.)



Chapter 1.X. A Rough Spirit Raised, Which May Hereafter Rend the Wizard.

While thus animated was the scene around the Capitol, within one of
the apartments of the palace sat the agent and prime cause of that
excitement. In the company of his quiet scribes, Rienzi appeared
absorbed in the patient details of his avocation. While the murmur and
the hum, the shout and the tramp, of multitudes, rolled to his chamber,
he seemed not to heed them, nor to rouse himself a moment from his task.
With the unbroken regularity of an automaton, he continued to enter
in his large book, and with the clear and beautiful characters of
the period, those damning figures which taught him, better than
declamations, the frauds practised on the people, and armed him with
that weapon of plain fact which it is so difficult for abuse to parry.

“Page 2, Vol. B.,” said he, in the tranquil voice of business, to the
clerks; “see there, the profits of the salt duty; department No.3--very
well. Page 9, Vol. D.--what is the account rendered by Vescobaldi, the
collector? What! twelve thousand florins?--no more?--unconscionable
rascal!” (Here was a loud shout without of ‘Pandulfo!--long live
Pandulfo!’) “Pastrucci, my friend, your head wanders; you are listening
to the noise without--please to amuse yourself with the calculation I
entrusted to you. Santi, what is the entry given in by Antonio Tralli?”

A slight tap was heard at the door, and Pandulfo entered.

The clerks continued their labour, though they looked up hastily at the
pale and respectable visitor, whose name, to their great astonishment,
had thus become a popular cry.

“Ah, my friend,” said Rienzi, calmly enough in voice, but his hands
trembled with ill-suppressed emotion, “you would speak to me alone,
eh? well, well--this way.” Thus saying, he led the citizen into a small
cabinet in the rear of the room of office, carefully shut the door,
and then giving himself up to the natural impatience of his character,
seized Pandulfo by the hand: “Speak!” cried he: “do they take the
interpretation?--have you made it plain and palpable enough?--has it
sunk deep into their souls?”

“Oh, by St. Peter! yes!” returned the citizen, whose spirits were
elevated by his recent discovery that he, too, was an orator--a
luxurious pleasure for a timid man. “They swallowed every word of the
interpretation; they are moved to the marrow--you might lead them this
very hour to battle, and find them heroes. As for the sturdy smith--”

“What! Cecco del Vecchio?” interrupted Rienzi; “ah, his heart is wrought
in bronze--what did he?”

“Why, he caught me by the hem of my robe as I descended my rostrum, (oh!
would you could have seen me!--per fede I had caught your mantle!--I was
a second you!) and said, weeping like a child, ‘Ah, Signor, I am but a
poor man, and of little worth; but if every drop of blood in this body
were a life, I would give it for my country!’”

“Brave soul,” said Rienzi, with emotion; “would Rome had but fifty
such! No man hath done us more good among his own class than Cecco del
Vecchio.”

“They feel a protection in his very size,” said Pandulfo. “It is
something to hear such big words from such a big fellow.”

“Were there any voices lifted in disapprobation of the picture and its
sentiment?”

“None.”

“The time is nearly ripe, then--a few suns more, and the fruit must be
gathered. The Aventine,--the Lateran,--and then the solitary trumpet!”
 Thus saying, Rienzi, with folded arms and downcast eyes, seemed sunk
into a reverie.

“By the way,” said Pandulfo, “I had almost forgot to tell thee, that the
crowd would have poured themselves hither, so impatient were they to see
thee; but I bade Cecco del Vecchio mount the rostrum, and tell them, in
his blunt way, that it would be unseemly at the present time, when thou
wert engaged in the Capitol on civil and holy affairs, to rush in so
great a body into thy presence. Did I not right?”

“Most right, my Pandulfo.”

“But Cecco del Vecchio says he must come and kiss thy hand: and thou
mayst expect him here the moment he can escape unobserved from the
crowd.”

“He is welcome!” said Rienzi, half mechanically, for he was still
absorbed in thought.

“And, lo! here he is,”--as one of the scribes announced the visit of the
smith.

“Let him be admitted!” said Rienzi, seating himself composedly.

When the huge smith found himself in the presence of Rienzi, it amused
Pandulfo to perceive the wonderful influences of mind over matter. That
fierce and sturdy giant, who, in all popular commotions, towered above
his tribe, with thews of stone, and nerves of iron, the rallying point
and bulwark of the rest,--stood now colouring and trembling before the
intellect, which (so had the eloquent spirit of Rienzi waked and fanned
the spark which, till then, had lain dormant in that rough bosom)
might almost be said to have created his own. And he, indeed, who first
arouses in the bondsman the sense and soul of freedom, comes as near as
is permitted to man, nearer than the philosopher, nearer even than the
poet, to the great creative attribute of God!--But, if the breast be
uneducated, the gift may curse the giver; and he who passes at once from
the slave to the freeman may pass as rapidly from the freeman to the
ruffian.

“Approach, my friend,” said Rienzi, after a moment’s pause; “I know all
that thou hast done, and wouldst do, for Rome! Thou art worthy of her
best days, and thou art born to share in their return.”

The smith dropped at the feet of Rienzi, who held out his hand to raise
him, which Cecco del Vecchio seized, and reverentially kissed.

“This kiss does not betray,” said Rienzi, smiling; “but rise, my
friend,--this posture is only due to God and his saints!”

“He is a saint who helps us at need!” said the smith, bluntly, “and that
no man has done as thou hast. But when,” he added, sinking his voice,
and fixing his eyes hard on Rienzi, as one may do who waits a signal to
strike a blow, “when--when shall we make the great effort?”

“Thou hast spoken to all the brave men in thy neighbourhood,--are they
well prepared?”

“To live or die, as Rienzi bids them!”

“I must have the list--the number--names--houses and callings, this
night.”

“Thou shalt.”

“Each man must sign his name or mark with his own hand.”

“It shall be done.”

“Then, harkye! attend Pandulfo di Guido at his house this evening,
at sunset. He shall instruct thee where to meet this night some brave
hearts;--thou art worthy to be ranked amongst them. Thou wilt not fail!”

“By the holy Stairs! I will count every minute till then,” said the
smith, his swarthy face lighted with pride at the confidence shown him.

“Meanwhile, watch all your neighbours; let no man flag or grow
faint-hearted,--none of thy friends must be branded as a traitor!”

“I will cut his throat, were he my own mother’s son, if I find one
pledged man flinch!” said the fierce smith.

“Ha, ha!” rejoined Rienzi, with that strange laugh which belonged to
him; “a miracle! a miracle! The Picture speaks now!”

It was already nearly dusk when Rienzi left the Capitol. The broad space
before its walls was empty and deserted, and wrapping his mantle closely
round him, he walked musingly on.

“I have almost climbed the height,” thought he, “and now the precipice
yawns before me. If I fail, what a fall! The last hope of my country
falls with me. Never will a noble rise against the nobles. Never will
another plebeian have the opportunities and the power that I have! Rome
is bound up with me--with a single life. The liberties of all time are
fixed to a reed that a wind may uproot. But oh, Providence! hast thou
not reserved and marked me for great deeds? How, step by step, have I
been led on to this solemn enterprise! How has each hour prepared its
successor! And yet what danger! If the inconstant people, made cowardly
by long thraldom, do but waver in the crisis, I am swept away!”

As he spoke, he raised his eyes, and lo, before him, the first star of
twilight shone calmly down upon the crumbling remnants of the Tarpeian
Rock. It was no favouring omen, and Rienzi’s heart beat quicker as that
dark and ruined mass frowned thus suddenly on his gaze.

“Dread monument,” thought he, “of what dark catastrophes, to what
unknown schemes, hast thou been the witness! To how many enterprises, on
which history is dumb, hast thou set the seal! How know we whether they
were criminal or just? How know we whether he, thus doomed as a traitor,
would not, if successful, have been immortalized as a deliverer? If I
fall, who will write my chronicle? One of the people? alas! blinded and
ignorant, they furnish forth no minds that can appeal to posterity. One
of the patricians? in what colours then shall I be painted! No tomb will
rise for me amidst the wrecks; no hand scatter flowers upon my grave!”

Thus meditating on the verge of that mighty enterprise to which he had
devoted himself, Rienzi pursued his way. He gained the Tiber, and paused
for a few moments beside its legendary stream, over which the purple and
starlit heaven shone deeply down. He crossed the bridge which leads
to the quarter of the Trastevere, whose haughty inhabitants yet boast
themselves the sole true descendants of the ancient Romans. Here he step
grew quicker and more light; brighter, if less solemn, thoughts crowded
upon his breast; and ambition, lulled for a moment, left his strained
and over-laboured mind to the reign of a softer passion.



Chapter 1.XI. Nina di Raselli.

“I tell you, Lucia, I do not love those stuffs; they do not become me.
Saw you ever so poor a dye?--this purple, indeed! that crimson! Why did
you let the man leave them? Let him take them elsewhere tomorrow.
They may suit the signoras on the other side the Tiber, who imagine
everything Venetian must be perfect; but I, Lucia, I see with my own
eyes, and judge from my own mind.”

“Ah, dear lady,” said the serving-maid, “if you were, as you doubtless
will be, some time or other, a grand signora, how worthily you would
wear the honours! Santa Cecilia! No other dame in Rome would be looked
at while the Lady Nina were by!”

“Would we not teach them what pomp was?” answered Nina. “Oh! what
festivals would we hold! Saw you not from the gallery the revels given
last week by the Lady Giulia Savelli?”

“Ay, signora; and when you walked up the hall in your silver and pearl
tissue, there ran such a murmur through the gallery; every one cried,
‘The Savelli have entertained an angel!’”

“Pish! Lucia; no flattery, girl.”

“It is naked truth, lady. But that was a revel, was it not? There was
grandeur!--fifty servitors in scarlet and gold! and the music playing
all the while. The minstrels were sent for from Bergamo. Did not that
festival please you? Ah, I warrant many were the fine speeches made to
you that day!”

“Heigho!--no, there was one voice wanting, and all the music was marred.
But, girl, were I the Lady Giulia, I would not have been contented with
so poor a revel.”

“How, poor! Why all the nobles say it outdid the proudest marriage-feast
of the Colonna. Nay, a Neapolitan who sat next me, and who had served
under the young Queen Joanna, at her marriage, says, that even Naples
was outshone.”

“That may be. I know nought of Naples; but I know what my court should
have been, were I what--what I am not, and may never be! The banquet
vessels should have been of gold; the cups jewelled to the brim; not
an inch of the rude pavement should have been visible; all should
have glowed with cloth of gold. The fountain in the court should have
showered up the perfumes of the East; my pages should not have been
rough youths, blushing at their own uncouthness, but fair boys, who had
not told their twelfth year, culled from the daintiest palaces of Rome;
and, as for the music, oh, Lucia!--each musician should have worn a
chaplet, and deserved it; and he who played best should have had a
reward, to inspire all the rest--a rose from me. Saw you, too, the
Lady Giulia’s robe? What colours! they might have put out the sun
at noonday!--yellow, and blue, and orange, and scarlet! Oh, sweet
Saints!--but my eyes ached all the next day!”

“Doubtless, the Lady Giulia lacks your skill in the mixture of colours,”
 said the complaisant waiting-woman.

“And then, too, what a mien!--no royalty in it! She moved along the
hall, so that her train well nigh tripped her every moment; and then
she said, with a foolish laugh, ‘These holyday robes are but troublesome
luxuries.’ Troth, for the great there should be no holyday robes; ‘tis
for myself, not for others, that I would attire! Every day should
have its new robe, more gorgeous than the last;--every day should be a
holyday!”

“Methought,” said Lucia, “that the Lord Giovanni Orsini seemed very
devoted to my Lady.”

“He! the bear!”

“Bear, he may be! but he has a costly skin. His riches are untold.”

“And the fool knows not how to spend them.”

“Was not that the young Lord Adrian who spoke to you just by the
columns, where the music played?”

“It might be,--I forget.”

“Yet, I hear that few ladies forget when Lord Adrian di Castello woos
them.”

“There was but one man whose company seemed to me worth the
recollection,” answered Nina, unheeding the insinuation of the artful
handmaid.

“And who was he?” asked Lucia.

“The old scholar from Avignon!”

“What! he with the gray beard? Oh, Signora!”

“Yes,” said Nina, with a grave and sad voice; “when he spoke, the whole
scene vanished from my eyes,--for he spoke to me of HIM!”

As she said this, the Signora sighed deeply, and the tears gathered to
her eyes.

The waiting-woman raised her lips in disdain, and her looks in wonder;
but she did not dare to venture a reply.

“Open the lattice,” said Nina, after a pause, “and give me yon paper.
Not that, girl--but the verses sent me yesterday. What! art thou
Italian, and dost thou not know, by instinct, that I spoke of the rhyme
of Petrarch?”

Seated by the open casement, through which the moonlight stole soft
and sheen, with one lamp beside her, from which she seemed to shade her
eyes, though in reality she sought to hide her countenance from Lucia,
the young Signora appeared absorbed in one of those tender sonnets which
then turned the brains and inflamed the hearts of Italy. (Although it is
true that the love sonnets of Petrarch were not then, as now, the most
esteemed of his works, yet it has been a great, though a common error,
to represent them as little known and coldly admired. Their effect was,
in reality, prodigious and universal. Every ballad-singer sung them
in the streets, and (says Filippo Villani), “Gravissimi nesciebant
abstinere”--“Even the gravest could not abstain from them.”)

Born of an impoverished house, which, though boasting its descent from
a consular race of Rome, scarcely at that day maintained a rank
amongst the inferior order of nobility, Nina di Raselli was the spoiled
child--the idol and the tyrant--of her parents. The energetic and
self-willed character of her mind made her rule where she should have
obeyed; and as in all ages dispositions can conquer custom, she had,
though in a clime and land where the young and unmarried of her sex
are usually chained and fettered, assumed, and by assuming won, the
prerogative of independence. She possessed, it is true, more learning
and more genius than generally fell to the share of women in that day;
and enough of both to be deemed a miracle by her parents;--she had,
also, what they valued more, a surpassing beauty; and, what they feared
more, an indomitable haughtiness;--a haughtiness mixed with a thousand
soft and endearing qualities where she loved; and which, indeed, where
she loved, seemed to vanish. At once vain yet high-minded, resolute yet
impassioned, there was a gorgeous magnificence in her very vanity and
splendour,--an ideality in her waywardness: her defects made a part
of her brilliancy; without them she would have seemed less woman; and,
knowing her, you would have compared all women by her standard. Softer
qualities beside her seemed not more charming, but more insipid. She had
no vulgar ambition, for she had obstinately refused many alliances which
the daughter of Raselli could scarcely have hoped to form. The untutored
minds and savage power of the Roman nobles seemed to her imagination,
which was full of the poetry of rank, its luxury and its graces, as
something barbarous and revolting, at once to be dreaded and despised.
She had, therefore, passed her twentieth year unmarried, but not without
love. The faults, themselves, of her character, elevated that ideal of
love which she had formed. She required some being round whom all her
vainer qualities could rally; she felt that where she loved she must
adore; she demanded no common idol before which to humble so strong and
imperious a mind. Unlike women of a gentler mould, who desire, for a
short period, to exercise the caprices of sweet empire,--when she loved
she must cease to command; and pride, at once, be humbled to devotion.
So rare were the qualities that could attract her; so imperiously did
her haughtiness require that those qualities should be above her own,
yet of the same order; that her love elevated its object like a god.
Accustomed to despise, she felt all the luxury it is to venerate! And
if it were her lot to be united with one thus loved, her nature was
that which might become elevated by the nature that it gazed on. For
her beauty--Reader, shouldst thou ever go to Rome, thou wilt see in the
Capitol the picture of the Cumaean Sibyl, which, often copied, no copy
can even faintly represent. I beseech thee, mistake not this sibyl for
another, for the Roman galleries abound in sibyls. (The sibyl referred
to is the well-known one by Domenichino. As a mere work of art, that by
Guercino, called the Persian sibyl, in the same collection, is perhaps
superior; but in beauty, in character, there is no comparison.) The
sibyl I speak of is dark, and the face has an Eastern cast; the robe
and turban, gorgeous though they be, grow dim before the rich, but
transparent roses of the cheek; the hair would be black, save for that
golden glow which mellows it to a hue and lustre never seen but in the
south, and even in the south most rare; the features, not Grecian, are
yet faultless; the mouth, the brow, the ripe and exquisite contour, all
are human and voluptuous; the expression, the aspect, is something more;
the form is, perhaps, too full for the perfection of loveliness, for the
proportions of sculpture, for the delicacy of Athenian models; but the
luxuriant fault has a majesty. Gaze long upon that picture: it charms,
yet commands, the eye. While you gaze, you call back five centuries. You
see before you the breathing image of Nina di Raselli!

But it was not those ingenious and elaborate conceits in which Petrarch,
great Poet though he be, has so often mistaken pedantry for passion,
that absorbed at that moment the attention of the beautiful Nina. Her
eyes rested not on the page, but on the garden that stretched below the
casement. Over the old fruit-trees and hanging vines fell the moonshine;
and in the centre of the green, but half-neglected sward, the waters of
a small and circular fountain, whose perfect proportions spoke of days
long past, played and sparkled in the starlight. The scene was still
and beautiful; but neither of its stillness nor its beauty thought Nina:
towards one, the gloomiest and most rugged, spot in the whole garden,
turned her gaze; there, the trees stood densely massed together, and
shut from view the low but heavy wall which encircled the mansion of
Raselli. The boughs on those trees stirred gently, but Nina saw them
wave; and now from the copse emerged, slowly and cautiously, a solitary
figure, whose shadow threw itself, long and dark, over the sward. It
approached the window, and a low voice breathed Nina’s name.

“Quick, Lucia!” cried she, breathlessly, turning to her handmaid:
“quick! the rope-ladder! it is he! he is come! How slow you are! haste,
girl,--he may be discovered! There,--O joy,--O joy!--My lover! my hero!
my Rienzi!”

“It is you!” said Rienzi, as, now entering the chamber, he wound his
arms around her half-averted form, “and what is night to others is day
to me!”

The first sweet moments of welcome were over; and Rienzi was seated at
the feet of his mistress: his head rested on her knees--his face looking
up to hers--their hands clasped each in each.

“And for me thou bravest these dangers!” said the lover; “the shame of
discovery, the wrath of thy parents!”

“But what are my perils to thine? Oh, Heaven! if my father found thee
here thou wouldst die!”

“He would think it then so great a humiliation, that thou, beautiful
Nina, who mightst match with the haughtiest names of Rome, shouldst
waste thy love on a plebeian--even though the grandson of an emperor!”

The proud heart of Nina could sympathize well with the wounded pride of
her lover: she detected the soreness which lurked beneath his answer,
carelessly as it was uttered.

“Hast thou not told me,” she said, “of that great Marius, who was no
noble, but from whom the loftiest Colonna would rejoice to claim his
descent? and do I not know in thee one who shall yet eclipse the power
of Marius, unsullied by his vices?”

“Delicious flattery! sweet prophet!” said Rienzi, with a melancholy
smile; “never were thy supporting promises of the future more welcome to
me than now; for to thee I will say what I would utter to none else--my
soul half sinks beneath the mighty burthen I have heaped upon it. I want
new courage as the dread hour approaches; and from thy words and looks I
drink it.”

“Oh!” answered Nina, blushing as she spoke, “glorious is indeed the lot
which I have bought by my love for thee: glorious to share thy schemes,
to cheer thee in doubt, to whisper hope to thee in danger.”

“And give grace to me in triumph!” added Rienzi, passionately. “Ah!
should the future ever place upon these brows the laurel-wreath due to
one who has saved his country, what joy, what recompence, to lay it
at thy feet! Perhaps, in those long and solitary hours of languor and
exhaustion which fill up the interstices of time,--the dull space for
sober thought between the epochs of exciting action,--perhaps I should
have failed and flagged, and renounced even my dreams for Rome, had they
not been linked also with my dreams for thee!--had I not pictured to
myself the hour when my fate should elevate me beyond my birth; when thy
sire would deem it no disgrace to give thee to my arms; when thou,
too, shouldst stand amidst the dames of Rome, more honoured, as more
beautiful, than all; and when I should see that pomp, which my own soul
disdains, [‘Quem semper abhorrui sicut cenum’ is the expression used by
Rienzi, in his letter to his friend at Avignon, and which was probably
sincere. Men rarely act according to the bias of their own tastes.) made
dear and grateful to me because associated with thee! Yes, it is these
thoughts that have inspired me, when sterner ones have shrunk back
appalled from the spectres that surround their goal. And oh! my Nina,
sacred, strong, enduring must be, indeed, the love which lives in the
same pure and elevated air as that which sustains my hopes of liberty
and fame!”

This was the language which, more even than the vows of fidelity and the
dear adulation which springs from the heart’s exuberance, had bound the
proud and vain soul of Nina to the chains that it so willingly wore.
Perhaps, indeed, in the absence of Rienzi, her weaker nature pictured to
herself the triumph of humbling the highborn signoras, and eclipsing the
barbarous magnificence of the chiefs of Rome; but in his presence,
and listening to his more elevated and generous ambition, as yet all
unsullied by one private feeling save the hope of her, her higher
sympathies were enlisted with his schemes, her mind aspired to raise
itself to the height of his, and she thought less of her own rise than
of his glory. It was sweet to her pride to be the sole confidante of his
most secret thoughts, as of his most hardy undertakings; to see bared
before her that intricate and plotting spirit; to be admitted even to
the knowledge of its doubts and weakness, as of its heroism and power.

Nothing could be more contrasted than the loves of Rienzi and Nina,
and those of Adrian and Irene: in the latter, all were the dreams, the
phantasies, the extravagance, of youth; they never talked of the future;
they mingled no other aspirations with those of love. Ambition, glory,
the world’s high objects, were nothing to them when together; their love
had swallowed up the world, and left nothing visible beneath the sun,
save itself. But the passion of Nina and her lover was that of more
complicated natures and more mature years: it was made up of a thousand
feelings, each naturally severed from each, but compelled into one focus
by the mighty concentration of love; their talk was of the world; it was
from the world that they drew the aliment which sustained it; it was of
the future they spoke and thought; of its dreams and imagined glories
they made themselves a home and altar; their love had in it more of the
Intellectual than that of Adrian and Irene; it was more fitted for this
hard earth; it had in it, also, more of the leaven of the later and iron
days, and less of poetry and the first golden age.

“And must thou leave me now?” said Nina, her cheek no more averted from
his lips, nor her form from his parting embrace. “The moon is high yet;
it is but a little hour thou hast given me.”

“An hour! Alas!” said Rienzi, “it is near upon midnight--our friends
await me.”

“Go, then, my soul’s best half! Go; Nina shall not detain thee one
moment from those higher objects which make thee so dear to Nina.
When--when shall we meet again!”

“Not,” said Rienzi, proudly, and with all his soul upon his brow, “not
thus, by stealth! no! nor as I thus have met thee, the obscure and
contemned bondsman! When next thou seest me, it shall be at the head of
the sons of Rome! her champion! her restorer! or--” said he, sinking his
voice--

“There is no or!” interrupted Nina, weaving her arms round him, and
catching his enthusiasm; “thou hast uttered thine own destiny!”

“One kiss more!--farewell!--the tenth day from the morrow shines upon
the restoration of Rome!”



Chapter 1.XII. The Strange Adventures that Befel Walter de Montreal.

It was upon that same evening, and while the earlier stars yet shone
over the city, that Walter de Montreal, returning, alone, to the convent
then associated with the church of Santa Maria del Priorata (both of
which belonged to the Knights of the Hospital, and in the first of which
Montreal had taken his lodgment), paused amidst the ruins and desolation
which lay around his path. Thou little skilled in the classic memories
and associations of the spot, he could not but be impressed with the
surrounding witnesses of departed empire; the vast skeleton, as it were,
of the dead giantess.

“Now,” thought he, as he gazed around upon the roofless columns and
shattered walls, everywhere visible, over which the starlight shone,
ghastly and transparent, backed by the frowning and embattled fortresses
of the Frangipani, half hid by the dark foliage that sprung up amidst
the very fanes and palaces of old--Nature exulting over the frailer
Art; “now,” thought he, “bookmen would be inspired, by this scene, with
fantastic and dreaming visions of the past. But to me these monuments of
high ambition and royal splendour create only images of the future. Rome
may yet be, with her seven-hilled diadem, as Rome has been before, the
prize of the strongest hand and the boldest warrior,--revived, not by
her own degenerate sons, but the infused blood of a new race. William
the Bastard could scarce have found the hardy Englishers so easy a
conquest as Walter the Well-born may find these eunuch Romans. And which
conquest were the more glorious,--the barbarous Isle, or the Metropolis
of the World? Short step from the general to the podesta--shorter step
from the podesta to the king!”

While thus revolving his wild, yet not altogether chimerical ambition,
a quick light step was heard amidst the long herbage, and, looking up,
Montreal perceived the figure of a tall female descending from that
part of the hill then covered by many convents, towards the base of the
Aventine. She supported her steps with a long staff, and moved with such
elasticity and erectness, that now, as her face became visible by the
starlight, it was surprising to perceive that it was the face of one
advanced in years,--a harsh, proud countenance, withered, and deeply
wrinkled, but not without a certain regularity of outline.

“Merciful Virgin!” cried Montreal, starting back as that face gleamed
upon him: “is it possible? It is she:--it is--”

He sprung forward, and stood right before the old woman, who seemed
equally surprised, though more dismayed, at the sight of Montreal.

“I have sought thee for years,” said the Knight, first breaking the
silence; “years, long years,--thy conscience can tell thee why.”

“Mine, man of blood!” cried the female, trembling with rage or fear;
“darest thou talk of conscience? Thou, the dishonourer--the robber--the
professed homicide! Thou, disgrace to knighthood and to birth! Thou,
with the cross of chastity and of peace upon thy breast! Thou talk of
conscience, hypocrite!--thou?”

“Lady--lady!” said Montreal, deprecatingly, and almost quailing beneath
the fiery passion of that feeble woman, “I have sinned against thee and
thine. But remember all my excuses!--early love--fatal obstacles--rash
vow--irresistible temptation! Perhaps,” he added, in a more haughty
tone, “perhaps, yet, I may have the power to atone my error, and wring,
with mailed hand, from the successor of St Peter, who hath power to
loose as to bind--”

“Perjured and abandoned!” interrupted the female; “dost thou dream that
violence can purchase absolution, or that thou canst ever atone the
past?--a noble name disgraced, a father’s broken heart and dying curse!
Yes, that curse, I hear it now! it rings upon me thrillingly, as when I
watched the expiring clay! it cleaves to thee--it pursues thee--it shall
pierce thee through thy corselet--it shall smite thee in the meridian of
thy power! Genius wasted--ambition blasted--penitence deferred--a life
of brawls, and a death of shame--thy destruction the offspring of thy
crime!--To this, to this, an old man’s curse hath doomed thee!--AND THOU
ART DOOMED!”

These words were rather shrieked than spoken: and the flashing eye, the
lifted hand, the dilated form of the speaker--the hour--the solitude of
the ruins around--all conspired to give to the fearful execration the
character of prophecy. The warrior, against whose undaunted breast a
hundred spears had shivered in vain, fell appalled and humbled to the
ground. He seized the hem of his fierce denouncer’s robe, and cried, in
a choked and hollow voice, “Spare me! spare me!”

“Spare thee!” said the unrelenting crone; “hast thou ever spared
man in thy hatred, or woman in thy lust? Ah, grovel in the
dust!--crouch--crouch!--wild beast as thou art! whose sleek skin and
beautiful hues have taught the unwary to be blind to the talons that
rend, and the grinders that devour;--crouch, that the foot of the old
and impotent may spurn thee!”

“Hag!” cried Montreal, in the reaction of sudden fury and maddened
pride, springing up to the full height of his stature. “Hag! thou hast
passed the limits to which, remembering who thou art, my forbearance
gave thee licence. I had well-nigh forgot that thou hadst assumed my
part--I am the Accuser! Woman!--the boy!--shrink not! equivocate not!
lie not!--thou wert the thief!”

“I was. Thou taughtest me the lesson how to steal a--”

“Render--restore him!” interrupted Montreal, stamping on the ground with
such force that the splinters of the marble fragments on which he stood
shivered under his armed heel.

The woman little heeded a violence at which the fiercest warrior of
Italy might have trembled; but she did not make an immediate answer. The
character of her countenance altered from passion into an expression
of grave, intent, and melancholy thought. At length she replied to
Montreal; whose hand had wandered to his dagger-hilt, with the instinct
of long habit, whenever enraged or thwarted, rather than from any design
of blood; which, stern and vindictive as he was, he would have been
incapable of forming against any woman,--much less against the one then
before him.

“Walter de Montreal,” said she, in a voice so calm that it almost
sounded like that of compassion, “the boy, I think, has never known
brother or sister: the only child of a once haughty and lordly race, on
both sides, though now on both dishonoured--nay, why so impatient? thou
wilt soon learn the worst--the boy is dead!”

“Dead!” repeated Montreal, recoiling and growing pale; “dead!--no,
no--say not that! He has a mother,--you know he has!--a fond,
meekhearted, anxious, hoping mother!--no!--no, he is not dead!”

“Thou canst feel, then, for a mother?” said the old woman, seemingly
touched by the tone of the Provencal. “Yet, bethink thee; is it not
better that the grave should save him from a life of riot, of bloodshed,
and of crime? Better to sleep with God than to wake with the fiends!”

“Dead!” echoed Montreal; “dead!--the pretty one!--so young!--those
eyes--the mother’s eyes--closed so soon?”

“Hast thou aught else to say? Thy sight scares my very womanhood from my
soul!--let me be gone.”

“Dead!--may I believe thee? or dost thou mock me? Thou hast uttered thy
curse, hearken to my warning:--If thou hast lied in this, thy last hour
shall dismay thee, and thy death-bed shall be the death-bed of despair!”

“Thy lips,” replied the female, with a scornful smile, “are better
adapted for lewd vows to unhappy maidens, than for the denunciations
which sound solemn only when coming from the good. Farewell!”

“Stay! inexorable woman! stay!--where sleeps he? Masses shall be sung!
priests shall pray!--the sins of the father shall not be visited on that
young head!”

“At Florence!” returned the woman, hastily. “But no stone records the
departed one!--The dead boy had no name!”

Waiting for no further questionings, the woman now passed on,--pursued
her way;--and the long herbage, and the winding descent, soon snatched
her ill-omened apparition from the desolate landscape.

Montreal, thus alone, sunk with a deep and heavy sigh upon the ground,
covered his face with his hands, and burst into an agony of grief; his
chest heaved, his whole frame trembled, and he wept and sobbed aloud,
with all the fearful vehemence of a man whose passions are strong and
fierce, but to whom the violence of grief alone is novel and unfamiliar.

He remained thus, prostrate and unmanned, for a considerable time,
growing slowly and gradually more calm as tears relieved his emotion;
and, at length, rather indulging a gloomy reverie than a passionate
grief. The moon was high and the hour late when he arose, and then few
traces of the past excitement remained upon his countenance; for Walter
de Montreal was not of that mould in which woe can force a settlement,
or to which any affliction can bring the continued and habitual
melancholy that darkens those who feel more enduringly, though with
emotions less stormy. His were the elements of the true Franc character,
though carried to excess: his sternest and his deepest qualities
were mingled with fickleness and caprice; his profound sagacity often
frustrated by a whim; his towering ambition deserted for some frivolous
temptation; and his elastic, sanguine, and high-spirited nature,
faithful only to the desire of military glory, to the poetry of a daring
and stormy life, and to the susceptibilities of that tender passion
without whose colourings no portrait of chivalry is complete, and in
which he was capable of a sentiment, a tenderness, and a loyal devotion,
which could hardly have been supposed compatible with his reckless
levity and his undisciplined career.

“Well,” said he, as he rose slowly, folded his mantle round him, and
resumed his way, “it was not for myself I grieved thus. But the pang is
past, and the worst is known. Now, then, back to those things that never
die--restless projects and daring schemes. That hag’s curse keeps my
blood cold still, and this solitude has something in it weird and awful.
Ha!--what sudden light is that?”

The light which caught Montreal’s eye broke forth almost like a star,
scarcely larger, indeed, but more red and intense in its ray. Of itself
it was nothing uncommon, and might have shone either from convent or
cottage. But it streamed from a part of the Aventine which contained
no habitations of the living, but only the empty ruins and shattered
porticoes, of which even the names and memories of the ancient
inhabitants were dead. Aware of this, Montreal felt a slight awe (as the
beam threw its steady light 

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