RIENZI – THE ROMANS OF THE MIDDLE AGES.

For the character and exploits of Rienzi the reader may be referred to the ‘Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.’ Those who have given us a portrait of the Romans of the dark ages have represented them as uniting in their persons all the vices that can degrade the human character; but, in spite of the invectives of Luitprand and Saint Bernard, those vices, with the exception of such as they shared with their barbarous contemporaries, seem reducible to their ancient reproach, that they could not bear complete servitude nor perfect freedom. The barbarian blood which had been transfused into their veins was likely to irritate rather than allay this impatience of control; and conceptions of original equality, to which the enslaved subjects of the Cæsars had long been strangers, might be imported by their union with the savages of the north. The ambassador of a despot and a saint might easily be disgusted with the thousand horrid forms which this tormenting feeling would assume, and which would betray itself in violence or perfidy, in arrogance or meanness, in proportion as they were able to shake away, or obliged to submit to, the yoke. Their conduct, from the first assumption of temporal power by the Popes, must seem absurd and contradictory, if it be not regarded as the consequence of a resolution to submit to no resident master whose foreign authority might enable him to employ a foreign force for their enslavement.