imely and unmerited fate of that
innocent boy. "My brother! my brother!" groaned the survivor; "how shall
I meet our mother?--how shall I meet even night and solitude again?--so
young, so harmless! See ye, sirs, he was but too gentle. And they will
not give us justice, because his murderer was a noble and a Colonna.
And this gold, too--gold for a brother's blood! Will they not"--and the
young man's eyes glared like fire--"will they not give us justice?
Time shall show!" so saying, he bent his head over the corpse; his lips
muttered, as with some prayer or invocation; and then rising, his face
was as pale as the dead beside him,--but it was no longer pale with
grief!

From that bloody clay, and that inward prayer, Cola di Rienzi rose a new
being. With his young brother died his own youth. But for that event,
the future liberator of Rome might have been but a dreamer, a scholar, a
poet; the peaceful rival of Petrarch; a man of thoughts, not deeds. But
from that time, all his faculties, energies, fancies, genius, became
concentrated into a single point; and patriotism, before a vision, leapt
into the life and vigour of a passion, lastingly kindled, stubbornly
hardened, and awfully consecrated,--by revenge!

Chapter 1.II. An Historical Survey--not to Be Passed Over, Except by
Those Who Dislike to Understand What They Read.

Years had passed away, and the death of the Roman boy, amidst more noble
and less excusable slaughter, was soon forgotten,--forgotten almost
by the parents of the slain, in the growing fame and fortunes of their
eldest son,--forgotten and forgiven never by that son himself.
But, between that prologue of blood, and the political drama which
ensues,--between the fading interest, as it were, of a dream, and the
more busy, actual, and continuous excitements of sterner life,--this may
be the most fitting time to place before the reader a short and rapid
outline of the state and circumstances of that city in which the
principal scenes of this story are laid;--an outline necessary, perhaps,
to many, for a full comprehension of the motives of the actors, and the
vicissitudes of the plot.

Despite the miscellaneous and mongrel tribes that had forced their
settlements in the City of the Caesars, the Roman population retained
an inordinate notion of their own supremacy over the rest of the world;
and, degenerated from the iron virtues of the Republic, possessed all
the insolent and unruly turbulence which c