have followed a different course, and the virtues he imposed upon Rome
might have borne fruit throughout all Italy. But with Rienzi, each new
phase was the possession of a new spirit of good or evil, and with each
successive change, only the man's great eloquence remained. While he was
a hero, he was a hero indeed; while he was a philosopher, his thoughts
were lofty and wise; so long as he was a knight, his life was pure and
blameless. But the vanity which inspired him, not to follow an ideal,
but to represent that ideal outwardly, and which inflamed him with a
great actor's self-persuading fire, required, like all vanity, the
perpetual stimulus of applause and admiration. He could have leapt into
the gulf with Curtius before the eyes of ten thousand grateful citizens;
but he could not have gone back with Cincinnatus to the plough, a
simple, true-hearted man. The display of justice followed the assumption
of power, it is true; but when justice was established, the unquiet
spirit was assailed by the thirst for a new emotion which no boasting
proclamation could satisfy, and no adulation could quench. The changes
he wrought in a few weeks were marvellous, and the spirit in which they
were made was worthy of a great reformer; Italy saw and admired,
received his ambassadors and entertained them with respect, read his
eloquent letters and answered them with approbation; and Rienzi's court
was the tribunal to which the King of Hungary appealed the cause of a
murdered brother. Yet his vanity demanded more. It was not long before
he assumed the dress, the habits, and the behaviour of a sovereign and
appeared in public with the emblems of empire. He felt that he was no
longer in spirit the Knight of the Holy Ghost, and he required for
self-persuasion the conference of the outward honours of knighthood. He
purified himself according to the rites of chivalry in the font of the
Lateran Baptistry, consecrated by the tradition of Constantine's
miraculous recovery from leprosy, he watched his arms throughout the
dark hours, and received the order from the sword of an honourable
nobleman. The days of the philosopher, the hero, and the liberator were
over, and the reign of the public fool was inaugurated by the most
extravagant boasts, and celebrated by a feast of boundless luxury and
abundance, to which the citizens of Rome were bidden with their wives
and daughters. Still unsatisfied, he demanded and obtained the ceremony
of a solemn cor