mporary rank of Vice-admiral; and
on July, 1739, he sailed for the American coast. When he reached it he
found that the news of the rupture of the peace had not yet reached the
governor of the city, and that it was in no condition to resist an
attack. Many of the guns were dismounted; and for those that were
serviceable there was not sufficient ammunition. A fire of musketry
alone sufficed to win the fort that protected the entrance to the
harbour, and an equally brief cannonade drove the garrison from the
castle. The governor had no further means of defence; and thus in
forty-eight hours after his arrival Vernon had accomplished his boast,
and was master of the place." In a clever paper in the "Cambridge Museum
Philologicum" Bishop Thirlwall compared the man and his exploit to Cleon
and his achievement at Sphacteria in the Peloponnesian War. (See the
Editor's "History of the British Navy," c. 9.)]

[Footnote 2: "_Rienzi._"

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.

("Childe Harold," iv. 114.)

His story is told with almost more than his usual power by Gibbon (c.
70). Born in the lowest class, "he could inherit neither dignity nor
fortune; and the gift of a liberal education, which they painfully
bestowed, was the cause of his glory and his untimely end." He, while
still little more than a youth, had established such a reputation for
eloquence, that he was one of the deputies sent by the Commons to
Avignon to plead with the Pope (Clement VI.). The state of Rome,
aggravated by the absence of the Pope, was miserable in the extreme. The
citizens "were equally oppressed by the arrogance of the nobles and the
corruption of the magistrates." Rienzi recalled to their recollection
"the ancient glories of the Senate and people from whom all legal
authority was derived. He raised the enthusiasm of the populace;
collected a band of conspirators, at whose head, clad in complete
armour, he marched to the Capitol, and assumed the government of the
city, declining "the names of Senator or Consul, of King or Emperor, and
preferring the ancient and modern appellation of Tribune.... Never
perhaps has the energy and effect of a single mind been more remarkably
felt than in the sudden, though transient, reformation of Rome by the
Tribune Rienzi. A den of robbers was conv