of the
Middle Age was to weave another long romance, less grand but more
stirring, less glorious but infinitely more human.

Perhaps it is not altogether beyond the bounds of reason to say that
Rome was masculine from Romulus to the dark age, and that with the first
dawn of the Renascence she began to be feminine. As in old days the
Republic and the Empire fought for power and conquest and got both by
force, endurance and hardness of character, so, in her second life,
others fought for Rome, and courted her, and coveted her, and sometimes
oppressed her and treated her cruelly, and sometimes cherished her and
adorned her, and gave her all they had. In a way, too, the elder
patriots reverenced their city as a father, and those of after-times
loved her as a woman, with a tender and romantic love.

Be that as it may, for it matters little how we explain what we feel.
And assuredly we all feel that what we call the 'charm,' the feminine
charm, of Rome, proceeds first from that misty time between two
greatnesses, when her humanity was driven back upon itself, and simple
passions, good and evil, suddenly felt and violently expressed, made up
the whole life of a people that had ceased to rule by force, and had not
yet reached power by diplomacy.

It is fair, moreover, to dwell a little on that time, that we may not
judge too hardly the men who came afterwards. If we have any virtues
ourselves of which to boast, we owe them to a long growth of
civilization, as a child owes its manners to its mother; the men of the
Renascence had behind them chaos, the ruin of a slave-ridden,
Hun-harried, worm-eaten Empire, in which law and order had gone down
together, and the whole world seemed to the few good men who lived in it
to be but one degree better than hell itself. Much may be forgiven them,
and for what just things they did they should be honoured, for the
hardship of having done right at all against such odds.

[Illustration: BRASS OF GORDIAN, SHOWING ROMAN GAMES]

[Illustration: RUINS OF THE JULIAN BASILICA]

V

Here and there, in out-of-the-way places, overlooked in the modern rage
for improvement, little marble tablets are set into the walls of old
houses, bearing semi-heraldic devices such as a Crescent, a Column, a
Griffin, a Stag, a Wheel and the like. Italian heraldry has always been
eccentric, and has shown a tendency to display all sorts of strange
things, such as comets, trees, landscapes and buildings in