otherwise judged in
a more enlightened age and by closet sages, served greatly to augment
the importance of the Tribune abroad, and to dazzle the pride of a
fickle and ostentatious populace. And taste grew refined, luxury called
labour into requisition, and foreigners from all states were attracted
by the splendour of a court over which presided, under republican names,
two sovereigns, (Rienzi, speaking in one of his letters of his great
enterprise, refers it to the ardour of youth. The exact date of his
birth is unknown; but he was certainly a young man at the time now
referred to. His portrait in the Museo Barberino, from which his
description has been already taken in the first book of this work,
represents him as beardless, and, as far as one can judge, somewhere
above thirty--old enough, to be sure, to have a beard; and seven years
afterwards he wore a long one, which greatly displeased his naive
biographer, who seems to consider it a sort of crime. The head is very
remarkable for its stern beauty, and little, if at all, inferior to that
of Napoleon; to which, as I before remarked, it has some resemblance in
expression, if not in feature.) young and brilliant, the one renowned
for his genius, the other eminent for her beauty. It was, indeed, a
dazzling and royal dream in the long night of Rome, spoiled of her
Pontiff and his voluptuous train--that holyday reign of Cola di Rienzi!
And often afterwards it was recalled with a sigh, not only by the poor
for its justice, the merchant for its security, but the gallant for its
splendour, and the poet for its ideal and intellectual grace!

As if to show that it was not to gratify the more vulgar appetite and
desire, in the midst of all his pomp, when the board groaned with
the delicacies of every clime, when the wine most freely circled, the
Tribune himself preserved a temperate and even rigid abstinence. ("Vita
di Cola di Rienzi".--The biographer praises the abstinence of the
Tribune.) While the apartments of state and the chamber of his bride
were adorned with a profuse luxury and cost, to his own private rooms he
transported precisely the same furniture which had been familiar to him
in his obscurer life. The books, the busts, the reliefs, the arms which
had inspired him heretofore with the visions of the past, were endeared
by associations which he did not care to forego.

But that which constituted the most singular feature of his character,
and which still wraps al