trained themselves from youth to manage the barb, and bear, through the
heats of summer, the weight of arms; and who, passing into am effeminate
and distracted land, had only to exhibit bravery in order to command
wealth. It was considered no disgrace for some powerful chieftain to
collect together a band of these hardy aliens,--to subsist amidst the
mountains on booty and pillage,--to make war upon tyrant or republic, as
interest suggested, and to sell, at enormous stipends, the immunities
of peace. Sometimes they hired themselves to one state to protect it
against the other; and the next year beheld them in the field against
their former employers. These bands of Northern stipendiaries assumed,
therefore, a civil, as well as a military, importance; they were as
indispensable to the safety of one state as they were destructive to the
security of all. But five years before the present date, the Florentine
Republic had hired the services of a celebrated leader of these
foreign soldiers,--Gualtier, duke of Athens. By acclamation, the people
themselves had elected that warrior to the state of prince, or tyrant,
of their state; before the year was completed, they revolted against his
cruelties, or rather against his exactions,--for, despite all the boasts
of their historians, they felt an attack on their purses more deeply
than an assault on their liberties,--they had chased him from their
city, and once more proclaimed themselves a Republic. The bravest, and
most favoured of the soldiers of the Duke of Athens had been Walter de
Montreal; he had shared the rise and the downfall of his chief. Amongst
popular commotions, the acute and observant mind of the Knight of St.
John had learned no mean civil experience; he had learned to sound a
people--to know how far they would endure--to construe the signs of
revolution--to be a reader of the times. After the downfall of the Duke
of Athens, as a Free Companion, in other words a Freebooter, Montreal
had augmented under the fierce Werner his riches and his renown. At
present without employment worthy his spirit of enterprise and intrigue,
the disordered and chiefless state of Rome had attracted him thither. In
the league he had proposed to Colonna--in the suggestions he had made
to the vanity of that Signor--his own object was to render his services
indispensable--to constitute himself the head of the soldiery whom his
proposed designs would render necessary to the ambition of the Col