tween youth and maturity--hope and experience;
he will notice in the Tribune vast ambition, great schemes, enterprising
activity--which sober into less gorgeous and more quiet colours in
the portrait of the Senator. He will find that in neither instance did
Rienzi fall from his own faults--he will find that the vulgar moral
of ambition, blasted by its own excesses, is not the true moral of the
Roman's life; he will find that, both in his abdication as Tribune,
and his death as Senator, Rienzi fell from the vices of the People. The
Tribune was a victim to ignorant cowardice--the Senator, a victim to
ferocious avarice. It is this which modern historians have failed to
represent. Gibbon records rightly, that the Count of Minorbino entered
Rome with one hundred and fifty soldiers, and barricadoed the quarter of
the Colonna--that the bell of the Capitol sounded--that Rienzi addressed
the People--that they were silent and inactive--and that Rienzi then
abdicated the government. But for this he calls Rienzi "pusillanimous."
Is not that epithet to be applied to the People? Rienzi invoked them to
move against the Robber--the People refused to obey. Rienzi wished to
fight--the People refused to stir. It was not the cause of Rienzi alone
which demanded their exertions--it was the cause of the People--theirs,
not his, the shame, if one hundred and fifty foreign soldiers mastered
Rome, overthrew their liberties, and restored their tyrants! Whatever
Rienzi's sins, whatever his unpopularity, their freedom, their laws,
their republic, were at stake; and these they surrendered to one hundred
and fifty hirelings! This is the fact that damns them! But Rienzi was
not unpopular when he addressed and conjured them: they found no fault
with him. "The sighs and the groans of the People," says Sismondi,
justly, "replied to his,"--they could weep, but they would not fight.
This strange apathy the modern historians have not accounted for, yet
the principal cause was obvious--Rienzi was excommunicated! (And this
curse I apprehend to have been the more effective in the instance of
Rienzi, from a fact that it would be interesting and easy to establish:
viz., that he owed his rise as much to religious as to civil causes. He
aimed evidently to be a religious Reformer. All his devices, ceremonies,
and watchwords, were of a religious character. The monks took part with
his enterprise, and joined in the revolution. His letters are full of
mystical fanatici