AN ECLOGUE OF ROME. If now at least she give herself the lie. To mortal man so sure and straight the way For thine the power and will, if right I see, Let this thy glory be ! 113 They succoured her when young, and strong and great, He, in her weak old age, warded the stroke of Fate. Forth on thy way, my Song! and, where the bold Tell him from me, to whom he is but known With suppliant attitude and streaming eyes, About the same time he wrote his fifth Eclogue, entitled "Pietas Pastoralis," which he sent to Rienzi, with a pleasing letter to describe its mystical meaning. Two peasants, Martius and Apicius, hold a dialogue on the restoration of the old farmhouse and the old bridge. A shepherd urges them to proceed with the work, and whilst they demur and delay, a winged messenger announces that another has undertaken it. The old farmhouse is the Capitol, the bridge is the Milvian Bridge. The contending peasants are types of the Roman community. The successful intervener is Rienzi himself. He it is who is to silence differences, tame the savage beasts, promulgate laws, and drive away the enemy. F.C.-IV. H "Thou art," the letter ends, "this younger brother of Rome. The rest is clear to thee. Farewell, great man, and remember me."-Epist. Var., 42. Rienzi may have been a braggart in power and a coward in the time of danger; but he was the champion of municipal freedom and Roman independence. The cause, more than the man, kindled the sympathy of Petrarch. Rienzi had communicated to the poet his great design when first they met at Avignon in 1343, in one of the churches of that city; and as the future tribune spoke, his burning words inflamed his hearer and enlisted him in his undertaking. "From that day forth," he writes, "I have been tossed between hope and fear. Oh! if everr-oh! if in this our day-oh that I should ever share in so great a work and so great a glory!" The glory sank in crime and disgrace. It is a lasting stain on Petrarch's memory that in the passion of the revolution he exhorted Rienzi to strike and spare not even those to whom he was himself bound by the strongest ties of gratitude and affection. "All severity is an act of piety; all pity is an act of inhumanity." His rhetoric became ferocious, and he imagined that he imitated Brutus in sacrificing his friends. Rienzi ultimately arrived at Avignon in chains; for, having escaped to Prague, the Emperor Charles IV. sent him back to the Pope in 1350; yet Petrarch retained sufficient influence at the Papal Court to lighten his imprisonment, and sufficient interest in his fallen hero to restore him to liberty. But the ties which bound the poet to the Colonna family were broken for ever. The "Glorious Colonna" to whom one of the noblest of his early sonnets had been addressed was laid low. The youthful scions of that INGRATITUDE TO THE COLONNAS. 115 ing year. great house shared his fate. The venerable grandsire survived his children. The Cardinal died in the followPetrarch confessed that he owed them everything; but "dearer than even these," he said, "is the commonwealth, dearer is Rome, dearer is Italy."1 The Colonnas behaved with dignity, and showed no unmanly resentment, when Petrarch quitted Avignon; and in after-years he lived to say of them, "They will always be my lords and at the same time my children, as many as spring from that root which I loved and still love." There are not many passages in modern English literature more happily conceived or more admirably expressed than the speech placed by Walter Savage Landor in the mouth of Petrarch, in that portion of the dialogues with Boccaccio which relates to the triumph and the fall of Rienzi. It narrates with truth and feeling this entire passage in his poetic history. "The luxury and rapacity of the Church, together with the insolence of the barons, excited that discontent which emboldened Nicolo de Rienzi to assume the station of Tribune. Singular was the prudence and opportune the boldness he manifested at first. His modesty, his piety, his calm serenity, his unbiassed justice, won to him the affections of every good citizen, and struck horror into the fastnesses of 1 This expression occurs in one of the letters addressed by Petrarch to the Commission of Four Cardinals appointed by Clement VI. to report on the reform of government in Rome. The poet does not hesitate to say that the root of the evil is the domination of the two great houses of Orsini and Colonna, to one of which he was personally attached; and that the essential reform of government in Rome must place it on a popular basis. The Cardinals did but little; but the people of Rome elected one Cerroni as their chief, who carried on the government of the city with success until the return of the Pope in 1367. every castellated felon. He might by degrees have restored the Republic of Rome, had he preserved his moderation; he might have become the master of Italy, had he continued the master of himself: but he allowed the weakest of the passions to run away with him: he fancied he could not inebriate himself too soon with the intemperance of power. He called for seven crowns, and placed them successively on his head; he cited Lewis of Bavaria and Charles of Bohemia to appear and plead their causes before him; and lastly, not content with exasperating and concentrating the hostility of barbarians, he set at defiance the best and highest feelings of his more instructed countrymen, and displayed his mockery of religion and decency by bathing in the porphyry font at the Lateran. How my soul grieved for his defection! How bitterly burst forth my complaints when he ordered the imprisonment of Stefano Colonna in his ninetieth year! For these atrocities you know with what reproaches I assailed him, traitor as he was to the noblest cause that ever strung the energies of mankind. For this cause, under his auspices, I had abandoned all hope of favour and protection from the Pontiff; I had cast into peril, almost into perdition, the friendship, familiarity, and love of the Colonnas. Even you, Giovanni, thought me more rash than you would say you thought me, and wondered at seeing me whirled along with the tempestuous triumph that seemed mounting to the Capitol. The calmness, the sagacity, the sanctitude of Rienzi, in the ascent to his elevation, rendered him only the more detestable for his abuse of power. Nothing is so immoral or pernicious as to keep up the illusion of greatness in wicked men. Their crimes, because they have fallen into the gulf of time, we call misfortunes, and, amid ten thousand mourners, grieve only for them who made them so. Is this reason? Is this humanity? Alas! it is man.' 1 Landor's Pentameron, Second Day. "1 I CHAPTER XII. THE DEATH OF LAURA. THESE were stormy and dreadful times. In 1348 the Black Death, as it was called, a pestilence of extreme virulence, spread over Europe. An outbreak of religious fanaticism in the sect styled the Flagellants followed in its train. The contest between France and England was at its height; Crecy was fought in 1346, Poictiers ten years later; and the land of France, which Petrarch had visited in happier days, was utterly laid waste. Italy, too, was devastated by civil war-notwithstanding which, Petrarch returned to Parma and Verona. On the 6th April, the twenty-first anniversary of the day when he had first seen Laura at the Church of St Clara, the plague terminated, after a short illness, the life of that adored lady. To me the following lines, which Petrarch inscribed on the first leaf of his favourite manuscript of Virgil, are more touching than the numerous sonnets he devoted to her memory :— “Laura, illustrious by her virtues, and long celebrated in my songs, first greeted my eyes in the days of my youth the 6th April 1327, at Avignon; and in the same city, at the same hour of the same 6th April, but in the year 1348, |