imond, that the good Bishop shared his peculiar table--the
only one admitted to that honour. As the eye ranged each saloon
and hall--it beheld the space lined with all the nobility and
knighthood--the wealth and strength--the learning and the beauty--of the
Italian metropolis; mingled with ambassadors and noble strangers, even
from beyond the Alps; (The simple and credulous briographer of
Rienzi declares his fame to have reached the ears of the Soldan of
Babylon.)--envoys not only of the free states that had welcomed the rise
of the Tribune, but of the highborn and haughty tyrants who had first
derided his arrogance, and now cringed to his power. There, were not
only the ambassadors of Florence, of Sienna, of Arezzo (which last
subjected its government to the Tribune,) of Todi, of Spoleto, and of
countless other lesser towns and states, but of the dark and terrible
Visconti, prince of Milan; of Obizzo of Ferrara, and the tyrant rulers
of Verona and Bologna; even the proud and sagacious Malatesta, lord of
Rimini, whose arm afterwards broke for awhile the power of Montreal,
at the head of his Great Company, had deputed his representative in his
most honoured noble. John di Vico, the worst and most malignant despot
of his day, who had sternly defied the arms of the Tribune, now subdued
and humbled, was there in person; and the ambassadors of Hungary and of
Naples mingled with those of Bavaria and Bohemia, whose sovereigns that
day had been cited to the Roman Judgment Court. The nodding of plumes,
the glitter of jewels and cloth of gold, the rustling of silks and
jingle of golden spurs, the waving of banners from the roof, the sounds
of minstrelsy from the galleries above, all presented a picture of such
power and state--a court and chivalry of such show--as the greatest of
the feudal kings might have beheld with a sparkling eye and a swelling
heart. But at that moment the cause and lord of all that splendour,
recovered from his late exhilaration, sat moody and abstracted,
remembering with a thoughtful brow the adventure of the past night,
and sensible that amongst his gaudiest revellers lurked his intended
murtherers. Amidst the swell of the minstrelsy and the pomp of the
crowd, he felt that treason scowled beside him; and the image of the
skeleton obtruding, as of old, its grim thought of death upon the feast,
darkened the ruby of the wine, and chilled the glitter of the scene.

It was while the feast was loudest that Rien