Orsini; a battle was fought and lost by them under shameful circumstances outside the Porta San Lorenzo ; and

'the naked bodies of more than eighty great nobles, formerly the dreaded oppressors of the people, were exposed until afternoon to the ferocious insults of the mob. This,' continues Gregorovius, 'is the black day of the Fabii in the history of the civic nobility of the Middle Ages. They never recovered; and the power of the great families, who had so long ruled the Republic, was broken for ever on November 20th, 1347.*

Rienzi perished, seven years later, almost on the spot where Tiberius Gracchus laid down his life-he too, on behalf of the 'Good Estate.' By order of the Colonna, his body was delivered up to the Jews, who burnt it, the third day, on a heap of thistles, in the Augustan Mausoleum.† His ashes were scattered, like those of his predecessor, Arnold of Brescia. But he remains the most fascinating of native Romans that his century brought forth—a madman, if not from the first, yet when success had crowned his earlier undertakings; and a rhetorician who ascended to large though distant conceptions, beyond his time, while in much he was the victim of its fantastic delusions. Was he 'a hero, a fool, a Christian knight, a drunken despot, a philosophic Pagan'? He may have been all these things, as Mr. Crawford judges; and yet he was something more: a spark, we will say, from the prophetic soul dreaming on things to come,' which looked out into the future and saw an independent Italy, a renovated Church, the Germans no longer trampling under their horses' hoofs the garden of the world. He had been admitted for a moment into the secret of the ages. On the dividing line of two civilisations he stands up visible, an enigmatic figure, bidding farewell to the centuries behind, saluting from afar those which advance to meet him. The right word for him is tragi-comedian. But when we have said so much, it is the tragedy, with its outlook on to-morrow, that stays in our remembrance.

The Popes had come back from Avignon to a city which lay in ruins. At a critical hour during the Great Schism, in 1379, the Romans, who sided with their Italian Pontiff, Urban VI, besieged and took Sant' Angelo, destroyed the Mausoleum down to the central part which encloses the vault, and would have scattered its blocks of peperino could they have found a method of subduing them. In 1404 Innocent VII found the city shut against him. He was master only of the Castle and the Vatican;

* Gregorovius, vi, Part i, 304.

Gregorovius, vi, Part ii, 516.

† Ibid., 373.

his subjects demanded that he should renounce the temporal power; and Ladislaus of Naples, under pretence of reconciling both parties, contrived to give back to the 'Ten,' who governed in the Capitol, that freedom which had been lost under Boniface IX. But when Martin V entered Rome on Michaelmas Day, 1420, the Republic, which had struggled so long to make of the Eternal City a community at once sovereign and self-governed, like Venice, Genoa, and the Lombard free towns, was breathing its last. Rome was commanded,' says Gibbon, ' by an impregnable citadel; the use of cannon is a powerful engine against popular seditions; a regular force of cavalry and infantry was enlisted under the banners of the Pope... and from the extent of his domain he could bring down on a rebellious city an army of hostile neighbours and loyal subjects.' Henceforth his dominion was that of a master; and the greatest nobles were his nephews, whom he raised from obscurity to wealth and splendour, and whose palaces, Doria, Farnese, Corsini, Borghese, or Rospigliosi, lent their names to adorn the Regions over which they towered.

More than one Pope had restored the Lateran Church, desolated by fires, sieges, earthquakes, and thunder-storms. Nicholas V, and many of his successors, heaped together the huge pile of the Vatican, with its seven divisions. St. Peter's was more than a hundred years in building, if it can be said ever to have attained completion. Sixtus V is the Augustus who laid out Rome as it appeared from the third quarter of the sixteenth to about the same period of the nineteenth century. The Jesuits and Dominicans occupied or divided the Region of the Pigna, in which stand the Pantheon, the Roman College, and Santa Maria sopra Minerva. Under a disguised name, as Campitelli, the Capitol itself furnished a residence to the single Senator and three Conservators who were all that now remained of the Senatus Populusque Romanus. And in 1580 Gregory XIII codified the ancient statutes, in accordance with which the city was henceforth to be governed. The policy of the Cæsars-once more to quote Gibbon-'has been repeated by the Popes; and the Bishop of Rome affected to maintain the form of a Republic, while he reigned with the absolute powers of a temporal, as well as spiritual, monarch.' In the eighteenth century, and on the eve of a Revolution which was destined to lead two Popes captive and sweep into limbo the very name of the Roman Empire, the same philosophic observer could write: If we calmly weigh the merits and defects of the

* Gibbon, LXX, vol. viii, 262.

ecclesiastical government, it may be praised in its present state as a mild, decent, and tranquil system, exempt from the dangers of a minority, the sallies of youth, the expenses of luxury, and the calamities of war.'

Rome, during the long interlude which fills up the later seventeenth century and all the eighteenth, had, on the surface, changed from a city of blood and romance to an open-air drawing-room, frequented by artists and by noblemen making the grand tour. The Villa Medici brings back those days with its garden-walks and fine over-arching trees, a company of foreign students or pilgrims to the picture galleries moving about in its halls. Baracconi speaks of the world which used to meet there a gay and indolent people, delicately occupied in gracing the comic stage; he regrets, says Mr. Crawford, the gilded chairs, the huge built-up wigs, the small-sword of the "cavalier' servente," and the abbe's silk mantle, the semiplatonic friendships, the jests borrowed from Goldoni... the exchange of compliments and madrigals and epigrams, and all the brilliant powdered train.' It was Venice in Rome, or Rome à la Pompadour, not the terrible tragic city which had seen within itself all the sorrows of the ages and the nations. But when Gibbon praised its tranquillity, the hour of revolution was mounting to the Capitol. Perhaps in Madame de Staël's 'Corinne' we get the liveliest picture of a dilettante Petrarchan society, which was in love with decadent art, and which practised a style no less florid than frivolous, though sometimes quickened by sallies of passion. However, the drop scene was already loosened; as it rattled down, the leisured eighteenth century made its exit to the sound of Bonaparte's artillery.

From the new Empire, from the Code Napoléon, from the awakening of national sentiment, from the rule of Prince Eugene at Milan, the Papal Government now took its deadly hurt. The Ghibelline idea revived, but in a form which had nothing Teuton or Transalpine. Bishops in Germany laid down their sceptres; the modern State swallowed up their lands and cities; the Pope alone survived as a temporal prince. How long? was the question. Attacked but not overthrown, his power lasted down to 1848 in presence of the old Republican dreams, which saw in Rome a separate and sovereign community. Had no alternative to those dreams appeared, he might be reigning still. But the philosopher and statesman, Gioberti, had, in his Risorgimento,' raised the cry, famous on many battle-fields, of 'Savoya'; he pointed to the heroic house, not

* Ibid., 259, 262.

† Crawford, i, 265.

perhaps Italian, yet always patriotic, which had defended the Alps and drawn its sword against the Austrians with unconquerable chivalry. The ideal that had floated before Rienzi's imagination was fixed in a definite and taking shape, modern or constitutional, but all the more attractive to men who were sick of the past, who detested the Middle Ages, and who were indignant at the thought of Italy as having been too long a museum, a picture-gallery, and an operatic stage. Freedom, which the Romans aspired after, was surely identical with progress, the aim of Italians in Lombardy, Piedmont, and the Duchies, if not in Naples or Sicily. The adventure was begun; a page of extraordinary boldness in design and colouring was added to the ancient chronicles. Guelf and Ghibelline, it might be said after 1870, had yielded at last to the Genius of Rome.

Public tragedies and sword-play without end traverse the Middle Ages of Rome, leaving everywhere a blood-stained footstep. But from Clement VII, after the Constable de Bourbon took the city in 1527, we follow through its palaces and streets the tragedies of households: Vittoria Accoramboni and the Orsini, Cardinal Caraffa and his accomplices, Alessandro and Piero Mattei, Beatrice Cenci, and so many others, whose story is the wildest tissue of jealousy, revenge, avarice, murder-of crime associated with fine manners and the highest dignities. Such tales were the scandal of English travellers, the quarry of the English playwright under Elizabeth and James. They stirred the curiosity of Montaigne; they provoked in Voltaire the pessimism which exhales from Candide.' One might imagine a breath of old Rome, a moral malaria, coming up out of the ruins of those grim palaces where the Cæsars tortured their victims, or from the amphitheatres which degraded sport into a thirst for human suffering beheld at ease. Forum, Palatine, Capitol are the Roman Bible, open at its most suggestive but forbidding pages. It is a Pagan city which holds within it, captive yet not subdued, the Christian spirit—a contrast so amazing that neither Tacitus nor Machiavelli could do justice to the philosophy which would exhaust its significance. The imperial Latin intellect' has been ever joined with a violence which affects us as though it were superhuman. And to complete the paradox, this Rome has been the world's law-giver.

Stern, colossal, unspeakably sad in her aspects to men of the North, she has still a charm that draws them, not now in the train of a Charles the Great or a Barbarossa, but with undiminished strength and sweetness. If this charm could be

resolved into its elements perhaps it would come to an end. It is not history alone; for of the countless travellers who visit the city in these hurrying days but few are acquainted with its classic reminiscences, fewer still with the confused and dismal records of its Middle Age. Nor is it religion alone, since it was felt by Goethe, and even conquered Hawthorne, whose 'Transformation' often serves as a guide-book to pilgrims from the States. It is something very great and high-the sense of history, religion, art, romance, all in one-an old world yet visible in its monuments, an escape into dreamland from the sordid present. Above all it is the vague instinctive feeling of innumerable generations summed up in Rome, their ambitions for this world, their aspirations towards the nextand all this extant in churches, streets, palaces, gardens, triumphal arches, mountains of crude brick, tombs, pillars, gateways, walls, at every turning, and in a second city under ground-that first overpowers and then by imperceptible degrees fascinates the stranger now, as it did the ambassadors of Pyrrhus. some twenty-two centuries ago. If the past abides in the present, and, as philosophers tell us, is its necessary condition, then Rome, above all other cities, deserves to be called the Eternal. For in its monuments and its institutions has been realised the story of mankind. Take it away and history would possess no centre, the nations no memories in common. It is Greek, Latin, Etruscan, Hebrew, German, Gaul, in its origin or associations; Italian also, in a certain large sense, but still more European-the World-City. Its governing ideas of Republic, Empire, Papacy, have by no means run their course. Regarded politically, it is the most modern of capitals, as for Christendom and civilisation it has long been the most ancient ; and, having survived countless revolutions, it is at once the tomb of antiquity and the living teacher of age after age.