the hero of a myth, have gathered thoughts and sentiments
of which he had himself no knowledge. On one of these nights I had been
threading the aisles of acacia-trees, now glaring red, now azure, as the
Bengal lights kept changing. My mind instinctively went back to scenes
of treachery and bloodshed in the olden time, when Corrado Trinci
paraded the mangled remnants of three hundred of his victims, heaped on
muleback, through Foligno, for a warning to the citizens. As the
procession moved along the ramparts, I found myself in contact with a
young man, who readily fell into conversation. He was very tall, with
enormous breadth of shoulders, and long sinewy arms, like Michelangelo's
favourite models. His head was small, curled over with crisp black hair.
Low forehead, and thick level eyebrows absolutely meeting over intensely
bright fierce eyes. The nose descending straight from the brows, as in a
statue of Hadrian's age. The mouth full-lipped, petulant, and passionate
above a firm round chin. He was dressed in the shirt, white trousers,
and loose white jacket of a contadino; but he did not move with a
peasant's slouch, rather with the elasticity and alertness of an untamed
panther. He told me that he was just about to join a cavalry regiment;
and I could well imagine, when military dignity was added to that gait,
how grandly he would go. This young man, of whom I heard nothing more
after our half-hour's conversation among the crackling fireworks and
roaring cannon, left upon my mind an indescribable impression of
dangerousness--of "something fierce and terrible, eligible to burst
forth." Of men like this, then, were formed the Companies of Adventure
who flooded Italy with villany, ambition, and lawlessness in the
fifteenth century. Gattamelata, who began life as a baker's boy at Narni
and ended it with a bronze statue by Donatello on the public square in
Padua, was of this breed. Like this were the Trinci and their bands of
murderers. Like this were the bravi who hunted Lorenzaccio to death at
Venice. Like this was Pietro Paolo Baglioni, whose fault, in the eyes of
Machiavelli, was that he could not succeed in being "perfettamente
tristo." Beautiful, but inhuman; passionate, but cold; powerful, but
rendered impotent for firm and lofty deeds by immorality and treason;
how many centuries of men like this once wasted Italy and plunged her
into servitude! Yet what material is here, under sterner discipline, and
with a nobler