l place. Inter it in some quiet and
remote spot--apart--alone! You promise me?--you swear it?--it is well!
And now help me on my horse. Farewell Italy, and if I die not with this
stroke, may I die as befits at once honour and despair--with trumpet and
banner round me--in a well-fought field against a worthy foe!--Save a
knightly death, nothing is left to live for!"

BOOK VII. THE PRISON.

"Fu rinchiuso in una torre grossa e larga; avea libri assai,
suo Tito Livio, sue storie di Roma, la Bibbia." &c.--"Vita
di Cola di Rienzi", lib. ii. c. 13.

"He was immured in a high and spacious tower; he had books
enough, his Titus Livius, his histories of Rome, the Bible,"
&c.

Chapter 7.I. Avignon.--The Two Pages.--The Stranger Beauty.

There is this difference between the Drama of Shakspeare, and that
of almost every other master of the same art; that in the first, the
catastrophe is rarely produced by one single cause--one simple and
continuous chain of events. Various and complicated agencies work out
the final end. Unfettered by the rules of time and place, each time,
each place depicted, presents us with its appropriate change of action,
or of actors. Sometimes the interest seems to halt, to turn aside, to
bring us unawares upon objects hitherto unnoticed, or upon qualities of
the characters hitherto hinted at, not developed. But, in reality, the
pause in the action is but to collect, to gather up, and to grasp, all
the varieties of circumstance that conduce to the Great Result: and the
art of fiction is only deserted for the fidelity of history. Whoever
seeks to place before the world the true representation of a man's
life and times, and, enlarging the Dramatic into the Epic, extends
his narrative over the vicissitudes of years, will find himself
unconsciously, in this, the imitator of Shakspeare. New characters, each
conducive to the end--new scenes, each leading to the last, rise before
him as he proceeds, sometimes seeming to the reader to delay, even while
they advance, the dread catastrophe. The sacrificial procession sweeps
along, swelled by new comers, losing many that first joined it; before,
at last, the same as a whole, but differing in its components, the crowd
reach the fated bourn of the Altar and the Victim!

It is five years after the date of the events I have recorded, and my
story conveys us to the Papal Court at Avignon--that tranquil seat of
power, to which th