wn quarter,
as formerly in many other cities, by gates closed at dusk and opened at
sunrise, altogether a busy, filthy, believing, untiring folk that
laughed at the short descent and high pretensions of a Roman baron, but
cringed and crawled aside as the great robber strode by in steel. And
close by the Ghetto, in all that remains of the vast Portico of Octavia,
is the little Church of Sant' Angelo in Pescheria where the Jews were
once compelled to hear Christian sermons on Saturdays.

[Illustration: PORTICO OF OCTAVIA

From a print of the last century]

Close by that church Rienzi was born, and it is for ever associated with
his memory. His name calls up a story often told, yet never clear, of a
man who seemed to possess several distinct and contradictory
personalities, all strong but by no means all noble, which by a freak of
fate were united in one man under one name, to make him by turns a hero,
a fool, a Christian knight, a drunken despot and a philosophic Pagan.
The Buddhist monks of the far East believe today that a man's individual
self is often beset, possessed and dominated by all kinds of fragmentary
personalities that altogether hide his real nature, which may in reality
be better or worse than they are. The Eastern belief may serve at least
as an illustration to explain the sort of mixed character with which
Rienzi came into the world, by which he imposed upon it for a certain
length of time, and which has always taken such strong hold upon the
imagination of poets, and writers of fiction, and historians.

Rienzi, as we call him, was in reality named 'Nicholas Gabrini, the son
of Lawrence'; and 'Lawrence,' being in Italian abbreviated to 'Rienzo'
and preceded by the possessive particle 'of,' formed the patronymic by
which the man is best known in our language. Lawrence Gabrini kept a
wine-shop somewhere in the neighbourhood of the Cenci palace; he seems
to have belonged to Anagni, he was therefore by birth a retainer of the
Colonna, and his wife was a washer-woman. Between them, moreover, they
made a business of selling water from the Tiber, through the city, at a
time when there were no aqueducts. Nicholas Rienzi's mother was
handsome, and from her he inherited the beauty of form and feature for
which he was famous in his youth. His gifts of mind were many, varied
and full of that exuberant vitality which noble lineage rarely
transmits; if he was a man of genius, his genius belonged to that order
which