e o'clock in the afternoon.

An unexampled visitor! For he had come through the passes of the Alps
with such an army as Italy had not seen before: with thousands of
terrible Swiss, well used to fight for love and hatred as well as for
hire; with a host of gallant cavaliers proud of a name; with an
unprecedented infantry, in which every man in a hundred carried an
arquebus; nay, with cannon of bronze, shooting not stones but iron
balls, drawn not by bullocks but by horses, and capable of firing a
second time before a city could mend the breach made by the first ball.
Some compared the new-comer to Charlemagne, reputed rebuilder of
Florence, welcome conqueror of degenerate kings, regulator and
benefactor of the Church, some preferred the comparison to Cyrus,
liberator of the chosen people, restorer of the Temple. For he had come
across the Alps with the most glorious projects: he was to march through
Italy amidst the jubilees of a grateful and admiring people; he was to
satisfy all conflicting complaints at Rome; he was to take possession,
by virtue of hereditary right and a little fighting, of the kingdom of
Naples; and from that convenient starting-point he was to set out on the
conquest of the Turks, who were partly to be cut to pieces and partly
converted to the faith of Christ. It was a scheme that seemed to befit
the Most Christian King, head of a nation which, thanks to the devices
of a subtle Louis the Eleventh who had died in much fright as to his
personal prospects ten years before, had become the strongest of
Christian monarchies; and this antitype of Cyrus and Charlemagne was no
other than the son of that subtle Louis--the young Charles the Eighth of
France.

Surely, on a general statement, hardly anything could seem more
grandiose, or fitter to revive in the breasts of men the memory of great
dispensations by which new strata had been laid in the history of
mankind. And there was a very widely spread conviction that the advent
of the French king and his army into Italy was one of those events at
which marble statues might well be believed to perspire, phantasmal
fiery warriors to fight in the air, and quadrupeds to bring forth
monstrous births--that it did not belong to the usual order of
Providence, but was in a peculiar sense the work of God. It was a
conviction that rested less on the necessarily momentous character of a
powerful foreign invasion than on certain moral emotions to which the
aspect of