gratitude of Italy, which was rapidly reported over the whole of Christendom." To Nicolas V., Italy, "or rather Latin Christianity, mainly owes her age of learning;" under him Rome was to resume her rank as the centre of Art, to be as of old the Lawgiver of Civilisation, to be "at once the strong citadel, and the noblest sanctuary in the world, unassailable by her enemies both without and within from her fortifications; commanding the world to awe by the unrivalled majesty of her churches." The ecclesiastical ædificia Nicolai Papa were the delight and the wonder of contemporaries. With him closes the series of Popes chronicled in the thirteen Books of "Latin Christianity." The Fourteenth Book, however, will be to many readers the most precious of the whole; surveying as it so admirably does the faith, the literature, the Teutonic languages, the Christian Architecture, Sculpture, and Painting, of the entire period under review. The theology of the great Schoolmen, the hymnologies of the devout, the theosophy of the mystics, Chaucer and Wycliffe, Petrarch and Boccaccio, Giotto and Fra Angelico, all are discussed, with an ability and critical acumen that must make this final volume very widely and specially attractive. Unhappily, we have no space left for illustration of this section of the work; nor have we been able to notice as they deserve the very numerous episodes, so to call them, in the course of its variegated pages, which relate the crises or catastrophes in the career of many a famous king and rebel, reformer and adventurer, man of peace and man of blood. Let us, however, bestow a page or two on one celebrity out of this throng, on Coli di Rienzi. Dr. Milman does justice to the "wonderful courage, address, and resolution," with which that remarkable man pursued his design of reawakening the old Roman spirit of liberty-submitting, for this purpose, to every kind of indignity, and assuming every disguise which might serve his end-playing the buffoon to amuse the haughty nobles in the Colonna palace-making himself, in the words of his autobiography, "a simpleton and a stage-player, and by turns serious or silly, cunning, earnest, and timid, as occasion required." Dr. Milman does justice, too, in graphic words, to the early rule of the Tribune, when there lay prostrate at his feet, and swearing obedience to his decrees, those nobles whom hitherto no Pope nor Emperor could expel from Rome-but whom Rienzi had expelled and recalled at will; whom Rienzi's "open, patient, inexorable justice" now delighted to humiliate: when financial reforms were planned and carried, military organisation controlled by constitutional authority, and not only the city, but all the country around blessed by a sudden and unwonted relief from disorder, violence, and general distrust. "The woods rejoiced that they concealed no robbers; the oxen ploughed the field undisturbed; the pilgrims crowded without fear to the shrines of the saints and the apostles; the traders might leave their precious wares by the roadside in perfect safety; tyrants trembled; good men rejoiced at their emancipation from slavery." The "glorious ends" of the Tribune's ambition are seen in the stress he lays upon the moral as well as civil revolution he had wrought, in his letters to the Emperor and elsewhere: had he not restored peace, he asks, among the cities which were distracted by faction? had he not decreed the readmission of exiled citizens? had he not begun to extinguish the party names of Guelf and Ghibelline, and to reduce Rome and all Italy into one harmonious, peaceful, holy confederacy? Had he not, too, been honoured by flattering advances from Christendom eastern and western-by solemn embassies and letters from the Emperor of Constantinople and the King of England? Had not the Queen of Naples submitted herself and her realm to his protection, and the King of Hungary urgently pressed upon his hearing the case against that fair defendant? But while Dr. Milman does justice to the good points in the character and the career, both so chequered with dark and bright, good and evil, of Rienzi, he is not a whit dazzled by the glare of his name and cause, nor fails to see what there was in him of hollowness, extravagance, and vanity. The Dean reckons it impossible to determine whether, as Rienzi himself in one place admits, it was mere vanity or a vague and not impolitic desire to gather round his own name all the glorious reminiscences of every period of Roman history, and so to rivet his power on the minds of men, which induced Rienzi to accumulate on himself so many lofty but discordant appellations*blending together in the strange pomp of his ceremonies and the splendid array of his titles, the Roman Republic, the Roman Empire in its periods of grandeur and of decline, the Church, and the chivalry of the middle ages. "He was the Tribune of the people, to remind them of the days of their liberty. He called himself Augustus, and chose to be crowned in the month of August, because that month was called after the great Emperor, the conqueror of Cleopatra.' He called himself Severe, not merely to awe the noble malcontents with the stern terrors of his justice, but in respect to the philosopher, the last of the Romans, Severinus Boethius. He was knighted according to the full ceremonial of chivalry, having bathed in the porphyry vessel in which, according to the legend, Pope Silvester cleansed Constantine the Great of his leprosy." At the height of his power and splendour, in the August of 1347, proclamations were made in his name as Nicholas, the Severe and Merciful, the Deliverer of the City, the Zealot for the freedom of Italy, the Friend of the World, the August Tribune. Seven dignitaries, civil and ecclesiastical, placed seven crowns on the head of the August Tribune-crowns of oak, ivy, myrtle, laurel, olive, silver, and gold; the seven together symbo * Latin Christianity, vol. v. pp. 523 sq. απο των επτα lising the sevenfold gift of the Holy Spirit (scil. anо тwν enта πνευμάτων, α εστιν ενωπιον του θρόνου). Then it was that Rienzi, with great swelling words of vanity, made that profane, not to call it blasphemous, comparison of himself to the Saviour of men, which shocked the wise, and foreshadowed the speaker's fall. His head swam at the elevation he had reached. He had reared an imposing edifice of power; but there needed only that the waves should surge against its base, that the rains descend, and the winds rise and beat upon it, and it must fall, for it was founded on the sand. Rome was not built in a day, the Rome of ancient days and everlasting renown. But Rienzi's Rome was. But Rienzi's Rome was. Rienzi's Romans had little in common with the Romans of the Republic. They were quick to cast down and quick to build up: we know what such building up is worth. "Still, as for centuries, the Romans were a fierce, fickle populace. Nor was Rienzi himself, though his morals were blameless, though he incurred no charge of avarice or rapacity, a model of the sterner republican virtues. He wanted simplicity, solidity, self-command. His ostentation, in some respects politic, became puerile. His processions, of which himself was still the centre, at first excited, at length palled on the popular feeling. His luxury-for his table became sumptuous, his dress, his habits splendid-was costly, burdensome to the people, as well as offensive and invidious. The advancement of his family, the rock on which demagogues constantly split, unwise." As to his religion, "the indispensable, dominant influence in such times," is fully proved to have been "showy and theatrical," and wanting that depth and fervour which spreads by contagion, hurries away, and binds to blind obedience its unthinking partisans.* The chronicle of Rienzi's rise and progress fully prepares us for that of his decline and fall. He was unequal to cope with adversity when it fairly measured its strength against his. It was as though some strange thing had happened unto him—ως ξενον αυτῷ συμβαίνοντος. He lacked defiant strength to stem the tide when it turned against him; he wanted stamina to breast the billows when they threatened to engulf him. "He had no military skill; he had not even the courage of a soldier." At the close of that memorable year, we see him stripped of power; we follow his fugitive track, as a lonely exile; we note his retreat in the wild Apennines, among deep ravines where dwell "the austerest of the austere Franciscans,"-exchang ing his pomp and luxury for the single coarse gown and cord of these stern Spiritualists; his life a perpetual fast, broken only by the hard fare of a mendicant: here he couches unknown for two years and upwards, years of terror and anguish in the great world without-during which the Black Plague was desolating Europe, and earthquakes shaking its capitals; Rienzi, the Roman Tribune cherishing meanwhile heavenward thoughts in his sombre seclu * Latin Christianity, vol. v. p. 527. sion ("O angels' life," he calls it, "which the fiends of Satan alone could disturb!")—and Clement, the Roman Pope, shutting himself up in his palace at Avignon, and burning large fires to keep out the black death. Yet a while, and Rienzi emerges from his retreat; we trace him to Prague, in conference with the Emperor, whom he seeks to dazzle by "mad apocalyptic visions,"-to Avignon, where, imprisoned and fettered, he has "his Bible and his Livy," and perhaps "yet unexhausted visions of future distinction," strangely destined to come true, and again to Rome, that the visions may be fulfilled, and the history of reformers have one name the more 66 to point a moral or adorn a tale❞—to Rome, whither he wends his way in gorgeous apparel, to resume as Senator the power he had won and lost as Tribune. But monastic austerities, and prison endurances, had alike failed to teach him practical wisdom. Dr. Milman again exhibits* him bewildered by the intoxication of power, returning to his old pomp and his fatal luxury-extorting the restoration of his confiscated property, only to waste it in idle expenditure. "He was constantly encircled by his armed guard; he passed his time in noisy drunken banquets. His person became gross, hateful, and repulsive. Again called on to show his military prowess against the refractory Colonnas, he was again found wanting." Add to which, that the stern and equal power which had before given a commanding majesty to his wild justice, now seemed to turn to caprice and wantonness of power; while ingratitude and treachery sullied the proscriptive severities he, this time, enforced against his foes. He had shrunk from politic repression before; he was impolitic in vengeance and extermination now. The Tribune would not strike hard, and had to flee. The Senator struck too hard, and must die. "Tyrant!" was the word in the streets; that word begat insurrec tion; and anon the "Romans" slew the "last of Romans,"t amid shouts of "The People for ever!" and "Death to the traitor Rienzi!"-exhausting upon the poor battered corpse the last resources of that most lawless of things, mob-law; of that most vindictive of things, mob-vengeance. Latin Christianity, vol. v. p. 552. † Byron's phrase, in the well-known apostrophe Redeemer of dark centuries of shame- The forum's champion, and the people's chief Her new-born Numa thou-with reign, alas! too brief." Devout or sentimental Rienzi-ites, who have been made such by an exclusive faith in Byron and Bulwer, will not perhaps bless the opportunity audire alteram partem, when that other "party," however salutary a counter-agent to their ex parte impressions, is so unprepossessed (and therefore to them unprepossessing) an authority as the Dean of St. Paul's. PEACE AND THE IMPERIAL DYNASTY. THE proclamation of peace has, through the good fortune of the Emperor of the French, been heralded by an event still more auspicious to the existing Government of France than even the proximate close of hostilities. The same good fortune which has raised Louis Napoleon from an exile to a sovereign has presented him with an heir on whom may devolve his vast acquisitions, and who will, at any rate, have as good a claim as any other Frenchman to the throne of the first nation of the Continent. For upwards of two centuries in no one of the dynasties to which France has been subjected has the son succeeded to the throne of the father. That the child now born should live to fulfil the bright anticipations indulged in at its birth, is a blessing almost too unprecedented to be entertained without misgiving; but it is in that very circumstance, in the misfortunes of the French throne and the French nation, in those defaults of lineage which have conspired so long and so miserably with the characteristic caprice of that excitable people, that now lies the reality and the earnest of the prayers addressed by all the different bodies of the State, and re-echoed by so many in this country, for the welfare and prosperity of the Imperial Prince. The Legislative Body, alluding to hopes similar to those which are now entertained on all sides having been conceived at other periods and not realised, attested as to why those to which they so cordially gave vent upon this occasion inspired them with so much confidence: "It is, sire, because the two dangers which have upset thrones-revolutions at home and coalition abroad-have been averted by you; you overcame revolution by force, diverted it by labour, calmed it by clemency; you have conciliated foreign states with France, because your armies have only reaped glory in the maintenance of justice and of right, and because you have known how to add to the greatness of France without humiliating Europe." The Emperor acknowledged that the unanimous acclamations which have hailed the birth of a son have not prevented him from reflecting upon the fate of those born in the same place, and under similar circumstances. But he added: "If I hope that his fate may be a happier one, it is that, first of all, confiding in Providence, I cannot doubt of its protection when I see it restore again by an extraordinary combination of circumstances what it was pleased to overthrow forty years since, as if it wished to mature by martyrdom and misfortune a new dynasty issuing from the VOL. XXXIX. Z |