erves no
partial witness, 'so extraordinary a man.' ("Vita di Cola di Rienzi",
lib. ii. c. 23.) 'In him was concentrated every thought for every want
of Rome. Indefatigably occupied, he inspected, ordained, regulated all
things; in the city, in the army, for peace, or for war. But he was
feebly supported, and those he employed were lukewarm and lethargic.'
Still his arms prospered. Place after place, fortress after fortress,
yielded to the Lieutenant of the Senator: and the cession of Palestrina
itself was hourly expected. His art and address were always strikingly
exhibited in difficult situations, and the reader cannot fail to have
noticed how conspicuously they were displayed in delivering himself from
the iron tutelage of his foreign mercenaries. Montreal executed, his
brothers imprisoned, (though their lives were spared,) a fear that
induced respect was stricken into the breasts of those bandit soldiers.
Removed from Rome, and, under Annibaldi, engaged against the Barons,
constant action and constant success, withheld those necessary fiends
from falling on their Master; while Rienzi, willing to yield to the
natural antipathy of the Romans, thus kept the Northmen from all contact
with the city; and as he boasted, was the only chief in Italy who
reigned in his palace guarded only by his citizens.

Despite his perilous situation--despite his suspicions, and his fears,
no wanton cruelty stained his stern justice--Montreal and Pandulfo di
Guido were the only state victims he demanded. If, according to the
dark Machiavelism of Italian wisdom, the death of those enemies was
impolitic, it was not in the act, but the mode of doing it. A prince
of Bologna, or of Milan would have avoided the sympathy excited by
the scaffold, and the drug or the dagger would have been the safer
substitute for the axe. But with all his faults, real and imputed, no
single act of that foul and murtherous policy, which made the science
of the more fortunate princes of Italy, ever advanced the ambition or
promoted the security of the Last of the Roman Tribunes. Whatever his
errors, he lived and died as became a man, who dreamed the vain but
glorious dream, that in a corrupt and dastard populace he could revive
the genius of the old Republic.

Of all who attended on the Senator, the most assiduous and the most
honoured was still Angelo Villani. Promoted to a high civil station,
Rienzi felt it as a return of youth, to find one person entitled to his