rn the world with a history of unimaginable horror.

That was the Middle Age in Italy. A poorer race would have gone down
therein to a bloody destruction; but it was out of the Middle Age that
the Italians were born again in the Renascence. It deserved the name.

[Illustration]

REGION IV CAMPO MARZO

It was harvest time when the Romans at last freed themselves from the
very name of Tarquin. In all the great field, between the Tiber and the
City, the corn stood high and ripe, waiting for the sickle, while Brutus
did justice upon his two sons, and upon the sons of his sister, and upon
those 'very noble youths,' still the Tarquins' friends, who laid down
their lives for their mistaken loyalty and friendship, and for whose
devotion no historian has ever been brave enough, or generous enough, to
say a word. It has been said that revolution is patriotism when it
succeeds, treason when it fails, and in the converse, more than one
brave man has died a traitor's death for keeping faith with a fallen
king. Successful revolution denied those young royalists the charitable
handful of earth and the four words of peace--'sit eis terra
levis'--that should have laid their unquiet ghosts, and the brutal
cynicism of history has handed down their names to the perpetual
execration of mankind.

The corn stood high in the broad field which the Tarquins had taken from
Mars and had ploughed and tilled for generations. The people went out
and reaped the crop, and bound it in sheaves to be threshed for the
public bread, but their new masters told them that it would be impious
to eat what had been meant for kings, and they did as was commanded to
them, meekly, and threw all into the river. Sheaf upon sheaf, load upon
load, the yellow stream swept away the yellow ears and stalks, down to
the shallows, where the whole mass stuck fast, and the seeds took root
in the watery mud, and the stalks rotted in great heaps, and the island
of the Tiber was first raised above the level of the water. Then the
people burned the stubble and gave back the land to Mars, calling it the
Campus Martius, after him.

There the young Romans learned the use of arms, and were taught to ride;
and under sheds there stood those rows of wooden horses, upon which
youths learned to vault, without step or stirrup, in their armour and
sword in hand. There they ran foot-races in the clouds of dust whirled
up from the dry ground, and threw the discus by the twisted th