self; luxury and abstinence, sternness and susceptibility, pride to
the great, humility to the low; the most devoted patriotism and the most
avid desire of personal power. As few men undertake great and desperate
designs without strong animal spirits, so it may be observed, that with
most who have risen to eminence over the herd, there is an aptness, at
times, to a wild mirth and an elasticity of humour which often astonish
the more sober and regulated minds, that are "the commoners of life:"
And the theatrical grandeur of Napoleon, the severe dignity of
Cromwell, are strangely contrasted by a frequent, nor always seasonable
buffoonery, which it is hard to reconcile with the ideal of their
characters, or the gloomy and portentous interest of their careers. And
this, equally a trait in the temperament of Rienzi, distinguished his
hours of relaxation, and contributed to that marvellous versatility with
which his harder nature accommodated itself to all humours and all men.
Often from his austere judgment-seat he passed to the social board an
altered man; and even the sullen Barons who reluctantly attended his
feasts, forgot his public greatness in his familiar wit; albeit this
reckless humour could not always refrain from seeking its subject in the
mortification of his crest-fallen foes--a pleasure it would have been
wiser and more generous to forego. And perhaps it was, in part, the
prompting of this sarcastic and unbridled humour that made him often
love to astonish as well as to awe. But even this gaiety, if so it may
be called, taking an appearance of familiar frankness, served much to
ingratiate him with the lower orders; and, if a fault in the prince, was
a virtue in the demagogue.

To these various characteristics, now fully developed, the reader must
add a genius of designs so bold, of conceptions so gigantic and august,
conjoined with that more minute and ordinary ability which masters
details; that with a brave, noble, intelligent, devoted people to back
his projects, the accession of the Tribune would have been the close of
the thraldom of Italy, and the abrupt limit of the dark age of Europe.
With such a people, his faults would have been insensibly checked,
his more unwholesome power have received a sufficient curb. Experience
familiarizing him with power, would have gradually weaned him from
extravagance in its display; and the active and masculine energy of his
intellect would have found field for the more r