is never far removed from madness and always akin to folly. The
greatest of his talents was his eloquence, the least of his qualities
was judgment, and while he possessed the courage to face danger
unflinchingly, and the means of persuading vast multitudes to follow him
in the realization of an exalted dream, he had neither the wit to trace
a cause to its consequence, nor the common sense to rest when he had
done enough. He had no mental perspective, nor sense of proportion, and
in the words of Madame de Stael he 'mistook memories for hopes.'

He was born in the year 1313, in the turbulent year that followed the
coronation of Henry the Seventh of Luxemburg; and when his vanity had
come upon him like a blight, he insulted the memory of his beautiful
mother by claiming to be the Emperor's son. In his childhood he was sent
to Anagni. There it must be supposed that he acquired his knowledge of
Latin from a country priest, and there he lived that early life of
solitude and retirement which, with ardent natures, is generally the
preparation for an outburst of activity that is to dazzle, or delight,
or terrify the world. Thence he came back, a stripling of twenty years,
dazed with dreaming and surfeited with classic lore, to begin the
struggle for existence in his native Rome as an obscure notary.

It seems impossible to convey an adequate idea of the confusion and
lawlessness of those times, and it is hard to understand how any city
could exist at all in such absence of all authority and government. The
powers were nominally the Pope and the Emperor, but the Pope had obeyed
the commands of Philip the Fair and had retired to Avignon, and no
Emperor could even approach Rome without an army at his back and the
alliance of the Ghibelline Colonna to uphold him if he succeeded in
entering the city. The maintenance of order and the execution of such
laws as existed, were confided to a mis-called Senator and a so-called
Prefect. The Senatorship was the property of the Barons, and when Rienzi
was born the Orsini and Colonna had just agreed to hold it jointly to
the exclusion of every one else. The prefecture was hereditary in the
ancient house of Di Vico, from whose office the Via de' Prefetti in the
Region of Campo Marzo is named to this day; the head of the house was at
first required to swear allegiance to the Pope, to the Emperor, and to
the Roman People, and as the three were almost perpetually at swords
drawn with one another,