The Makers of Modern Rome Part 19

This was the terrible awaking of the doomed man--without preparation, without the sound of a bell, or any of the usual warnings, roused from his day-dream of idle thoughts, his Greek wine, the indulgences to which he had accustomed himself, in his vain self-confidence. He had no home on the heights of that Capitol to which he had returned with such triumph. If his son Lorenzo was dead or living we do not hear.

His wife had entered one of the convents of the Poor Clares, when he was wandering in the Apennines, and was far from him. There is not a word of any one who loved him, unless it might chance to be the poor relation who stood by him, Locciolo, the furrier, perhaps kept about him to look after his robes of minever, the royal fur. The cry that now surged round the ill-secured and half-ruinous palace would seem to have been indistinguishable to him, even when the hoa.r.s.e roar came so near, like the das.h.i.+ng of a horrible wave round the walls: _Viva lo Popolo!_ that was one thing. With his _belle parole_ he could have easily turned that to his advantage, shouting it too. What else was he there for but to glorify the people? But the terrible thunder of sound took another tone, a longer cry, requiring a deeper breath--_Death to the traitor_:--these are not words a man can long mistake. Something had to be done--he knew not what. In that equality of misery which makes a man acquainted with such strange bedfellows, the Senator turned to the three humble retainers who trembled round him, and asked their advice. "By my faith, the thing cannot go like this," he said.

It would appear that some one advised him to face the crowd: for he dressed himself in his costume as a knight, took the banner of the people in his hand, and went out upon the balcony:

"He extended his hand, making a sign that all were to be silent, and that he was about to speak. Without doubt if they had listened to him he would have broken their will and changed their opinion. But the Romans would not listen; they were as swine; they threw stones and aimed arrows at him, and some ran with fire to set light to the door. So many were the arrows shot at him that he could not remain on the balcony. Then he took the Gonfalone and spread out the standard, and with both his hands pointed to the letters of gold, the arms of the citizens of Rome--almost as if he said 'You will not let me speak; but I am a citizen and a man of the people like you. I love you; and if you kill me, you will kill yourselves who are Romans.'

But he could not continue in this position, for the people, without intellect, grew worse and worse. 'Death to the traitor,' they cried."

A great confusion was in the mind of the unfortunate Tribune. He could no longer keep his place in the balcony, and the rioters had set fire to the great door below, which began to burn. If he escaped into the room above, it was the prison of Bertram of Narbonne, the brother of Moreale, who would have killed him. In this dreadful strait Rienzi had himself let down by sheets knotted together into the court behind, encircled by the walls of the prison. Even here treachery pursued him, for Locciolo, his kinsman, ran out to the balcony, and with signs and cries informed the crowd that he had gone away behind, and was escaping by the other side. He it was, says the chronicler, who killed Rienzi; for he first aided him in his descent and then betrayed him.

For one desperate moment of indecision the fallen Tribune held a last discussion with himself in the court of the prison. Should he still go forth in his knight's dress, armed and with his sword in his hand, and die there with dignity, "like a magnificent person," in the sight of all men? But life was still sweet. He threw off his surcoat, cut his beard and begrimed his face--then going into the porter's lodge, he found a peasant's coat which he put on, and seizing a covering from the bed, threw it over him, as if the pillage of the Palazzo had begun, and sallied forth. He struggled through the burning as best he could, and came through it untouched by the fire, speaking like a countryman, and crying "Up! Up! _a glui, traditore!_ As he pa.s.sed the last door one of the crowd accosted him roughly, and pushed back the article on his head, which would seem to have been a _duvet_, or heavy quilt: upon which the splendour of the bracelet he wore on his wrist became visible, and he was recognised. He was immediately seized, not with any violence at first, and taken down the great stair to the foot of the Lion, where the sentences were usually read. When he reached that spot, "a silence was made" (_fo fatto uno silentio_). "No man,"

says the chronicler, "showed any desire to touch him. He stood there for about an hour, his beard cut, his face black like a furnace-man, in a tunic of green silk, and yellow hose like a baron." In the silence, as he stood there, during that awful hour, he turned his head from side to side, "looking here and there." He does not seem to have made any attempt to speak, but bewildered in the collapse of his being, pitifully contemplated the horrible crowd, glaring at him, no man daring to strike the first blow. At last a follower of his own, one of the leaders of the mob, made a thrust with his sword--and immediately a dozen others followed. He died at the first stroke, his biographer tells us, and felt no pain. The whole dreadful scene pa.s.sed in silence--"not a word was said," the piteous, eager head, looking here and there, fell, and all was over. And the roar of the dreadful crowd burst forth again.

The still more horrible details that follow need not be here given.

The unfortunate had grown fat in the luxury of these latter days.

_Gra.s.so era horriblimente. Bianco come latte ensanguinato_, says the chronicler: and again he places before us, as at San Lorenzo seven years before, the white figure lying on the pavement, the red of the blood. It was dragged along the streets to the Colonna quarter; it was hung up to a balcony; finally the headless body, after all these dishonours, was taken to an open place before the Mausoleum of Augustus, and burned by the Jews. Why the Jews took this share of the carnival of blood we are not told. It had never been said that Rienzi was hard upon them; but no doubt at a period so penniless they must have had their full share of the taxes and payments exacted from all.

There is no moral even, to this tale, except the well-worn moral of the fickleness of the populace who acclaim a leader one moment, and kill him the next; but that is a commonplace and a worn-out one. If there were ever many men likely to sin in that way, it might be a lesson to the enthusiast thrusting an inexperienced hand into the web of fate, to confuse the threads with which the destiny of a country is wrought, without knowing either the pattern or the meaning of the weaving. He began with what we have every reason for believing to have been a n.o.ble and generous impulse to save his people. But his soul was not capable of that high emprise. He had the greatest and most immediate success ever given to a popular leader. The power to change, to mend, to make over again, to vindicate and to carry out his ideal was given him in the fullest measure. For a time it seemed that there was nothing in the world that Cola di Rienzi, the son of the wine-shop, the child of the people, might not do. But then he fell; the promise faded into dead ashes, the impulse which was inspiration breathed out and died away. Inspiration was all he had, neither knowledge nor the n.o.ble sense and understanding which might have been a subst.i.tute for it; and when the thin fire blazed up like the crackling of thorns under a pot, it blazed away again and left nothing behind. Had he perished at the end of his first reign, had he been slain at the foot of the Capitol, as Petrarch would have had him, his story would have been a perfect tragedy, and we might have been permitted to make a hero of the young patriot, standing alone, in an age to which patriotism was unknown. But the postscript of his second effort destroys the epic. It is all miserable self-seeking, all squalid, the story of any beggar on horseback, any vulgar adventurer.

Yet the silent hour when he stood at the foot of the great stairs, the horrible mob silent before him, bridled by that mute and awful despair, incapable of striking the final blow, is one of the most intense moments of human tragedy. A large overgrown man, with blackened face and the rough remnants of a beard, half dressed, speechless, his head turning here and there--And yet no one dared to take that step, to thrust that eager sword, for nearly an hour.

Perhaps it was only a minute, which would be less unaccountable, feeling like an hour to every looker on who was there and stood by.

No one in all the course of modern Roman history has so ill.u.s.trated the streets and ways of Rome and set its excited throngs in evidence, and made the great bell sound in our very ears, a _stuormo_, and disclosed the noise of the rabble and the rule of the n.o.bles, and the finery of the gallants, with so real and tangible an effect. The episode is a short one. The two periods of Rienzi's power put together scarcely amount to eight months; but there are few chapters in that history which is always so turbulent, yet lacks so much the charm of personal story and adventure, so picturesque and complete.

[Ill.u.s.tration: LETTER WRITER.]

BOOK IV.

THE POPES WHO MADE THE CITY.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PIAZZA DEL POPOLO.]

BOOK IV.

THE POPES WHO MADE THE CITY.

CHAPTER I.

MARTIN V.--EUGENIUS IV.--NICOLAS V.

It is strange to leave the history of Rome at the climax to which the ablest and strongest of its modern masters had brought it, when it was the home of the highest ambition, and the loftiest claims in the world, the acknowledged head of one of the two powers which divided that world between them, and claiming a supreme visionary authority over the other also; and to take up that story again (after such a romantic episode as we have just discussed) when its rulers had become but the first among the fighting princ.i.p.alities of Italy, men of a hundred ambitions, not one of which was spiritual, carrying on their visionary sway as heads of the Church as a matter of routine merely, but reserving all their real life and energy for the perpetual internecine warfare that had been going on for generations, and the security of their personal possessions. From Innocent III. to such a man as Eugenius IV., still and always fighting, mixed up with all the struggles of the Continent, hiring Condottieri, marshalling troops, with his whole soul in the warfare, so continuous, so petty, even so bloodless so far as the actual armies were concerned--which never for a moment ceased in Italy: is a change incalculable. Let us judge the great Gregory and the great Innocent as we may, their aim and the purpose of their lives were among the greatest that have ever been conceived by man, perhaps the highest ideal ever formed, though like all high ideals impossible, so long as men are as we know them, and those who choose them are as helpless in the matter of selecting and securing the best as their forefathers were. But to set up that tribunal on earth--that shadow and representation of the great White Throne hereafter to be established in the skies--in order to judge righteous judgment, to redress wrongs, to neutralise the sway of might over right--let it fail ever so completely, is at least a great conception, the n.o.blest plan at which human hands can work. We have endeavoured to show how little it succeeded even in the strongest hands; but the failure was a greater thing than any lesser success--certainly a much greater thing than the desire to be first in that shouting crowd of Italian princedoms and commonwealths, to pit Piccinino and Carmagnola against each other, to set your honour on the stake of an ironbound band of troopers deploying upon a harmless field, in wars which would have been not much more important than tournaments; if it had not been for the ruin and murder and devastation of the helpless peasants and the smitten country on either side.

But the pettier role was one of which men tired, as much as they did of that perpetual strain of the greater which required an amount of strength and concentration of mind not given to many, such as could not (and this was the great defect of the plan) be secured for a line of Popes any more than for any other line of men. The Popes who would have ruled the world failed, and gave up that forlorn hope; they were opposed by all the powers of earth, they were worn out by fictions of anti-Popes, and by real and continual personal sufferings for their ideal:--and they did not even secure at any time the sympathy of the world. But when among the vain line of Pontiffs who not for infamy and not for glory, but _per se_ lived, and flitted, a wavering file of figures meaning little, across the surface of the world--there arose a Pope here and there, forming into a short succession as the purpose grew, who took up consciously the aim of making Rome--not Rome Imperial nor yet Rome Papal, which were each a natural power on the earth and Head of nations, but Rome the City--the home of art, the shrine of letters, in another way and with a smaller meaning, yet still meaning something, the centre of the world--their work and position have always attracted a great deal of sympathy, and gained at once the admiration of all men. English literature has not done much justice to the greater Popes. Mr. Bowden's life of Gregory VII. is the only work of any importance specially devoted to that great ruler.

Gregory the Great to whom England owes so much, and Innocent III., who was also, though in no very favourable way, mixed up in her affairs, have tempted no English historian to the labours of a biography. But Leo X. has had a very different fate: and even the Borgias, the worst of Papal houses, have a complete literature of their own. The difference is curious. It is perhaps by this survival of the unfittest, so general in literature, that English distrust and prejudice have been so crystallised, and that to the humbler reader the word Pope remains the synonym of a proud and despotic priest, sometimes Inquisitor and sometimes Indulger--often corrupt, luxurious, or tyrannical--a ruler whose government is inevitably weak yet cruel.

The reason of this strange preference must be that the love of art is more general and strong than the love of history; or rather that a decorative and tangible external object, something to see and to admire, is more than all theories of government or morals. The period of the Renaissance is full of horror and impurity, perhaps the least desirable of all ages on which to dwell. But art has given it an importance to which it has no other right.

Curious it is also to find that of all the cities of Italy, Rome has the least native right to be considered in the history of art. No great painter or sculptor, architect or even decorator, has arisen among the Roman people. Ancient Rome took her art from Greece. Modern Rome has sought hers over all Italy--from Florence, from the hills and valleys of Umbria, everywhere but in her own bosom. She has crowned poets, but, since the days of Virgil and Horace, neither of whom were Romans born, though more hers than any since, has produced none. All her glories have been imported. This of course is often the case with her Popes also. Pope Martin V., to whom may be given the first credit of the policy of rebuilding the city, was a native-born Roman; but Pope Eugenius IV., who took up its embellishment still more seriously, was a Venetian, bringing with him from the sea-margin the love of glowing colour and that "labour of an age in piled stones" which was so dear to those who built their palaces upon the waters. Nicolas was a Pisan, Pope Leo, who advanced the work so greatly, was a Florentine.

But their common ambition was to make Rome a wonder and a glory that all men might flock to see. The tombs of the Apostles interested them less perhaps than most of their predecessors: but they were as strongly bent as any upon drawing pilgrims from the ends of the earth to see what art could do to make those tombs gorgeous: and built their own to be glories too, admired of all the world. These men have had a fuller reward than their great predecessors. Insomuch as the aim was smaller, it was more perfectly carried out; for though it is a great work to hang a dome like that of St. Peter's in the air, it is easier than to hold the hearts of kings in your hand, and decide the destiny of nations. The Popes who made the city have had better luck in every way than those who made the Papacy. Neither of them secured either the grat.i.tude or even the consent of Rome herself to what was done for her. But nevertheless almost all that has kept up her fame in the world for, let us say, the last four hundred years, was their work.

This period of the history of the great city began when Pope Martin V.

concluded what has been called the schism of the West, and brought back the seat of the Papacy from Avignon, where it had been exiled, to Rome. We have seen something of the moral and economical state of the city during that interregnum. Its physical condition was yet more desolate and terrible. The city itself was little more than a heap of ruins. The little cl.u.s.ter of the inhabited town was as a nest of life in the centre of a vast ancient ma.s.s of building, all fallen into confusion and decay. No one cared for the old Forums, the palaces ravaged by many an invasion, burned and beaten down, and quarried out, by generations of men to whom the meaning and the memory of their founders was as nothing, and themselves only so many waste places, or so much available material for the uses of the vulgar day. Some one suggests that the early Church took pleasure in showing how entirely shattered was the ancient framework, and how little the ancient G.o.ds had been able to do for the preservation of their temples; and with that intention gave them over to desolation and the careless hands of the spoiler. We think that men are much more often swayed by immediate necessities than by any elaborate motive of this description. The ruins were exceedingly handy--every nation in its turn has found such ruins to be so. To get the material for your wall, without paying anything for it, already at your hand, hewn and prepared as n.o.body then working could do it--what a wonderful simplification of labour!

Everybody took advantage of it, small and great. Then, when you wanted to build a strong tower or fortress to intimidate your neighbours, what an admirable foundation were those old buildings, founded as on the very kernel and central rock of the earth! For many centuries no one attempted to fill up those great gaps within the city walls, in which vines flourished and gardens grew, none the worse for the underlying stones that covered themselves thickly with weeds and flowers by Nature's lavish a.s.sistance. Buildings of various kinds, adapted to the necessities of the moment, grew up by nature in all kinds of places, a church sometimes placed in the very lap of an ancient temple. Indeed the churches were everywhere, some of them humble enough, many of great antique dignity and beauty, almost all preserving the form of the basilica, the place of meeting where everything was open and clear for the holding of a.s.semblies and delivery of addresses, not dim and mysterious as for sacrifices of faith.

[Ill.u.s.tration: MODERN ROME: Sh.e.l.lEY'S TOMB.

_To face page_ 518.]

So entirely was this state of affairs accepted, that there is more talk of repairing than of building in the chronicles; at all times of the Church, each pious Pope undertook some work of the kind, mending a decaying chapel or building up a broken wall; but we hear of few buildings of any importance, even when the era of the builders first began. Works of reparation must have been necessary to some extent after every burning or fight. Probably the scuffles in the streets did little harm, but when such a terrible inundation took place as that of the Normans, and still worse the Saracens, who followed Robert Guiscard in the time of Gregory VII., it must have been the work of a generation to patch up the remnants of the place so as to make it in the rudest way habitable again. It was no doubt in one of these great emergencies that the ancient palaces, most durable of all buildings, were seized by the people, and converted each into a species of rabbit-warren, foul and swarming. It does not appear however that any plan of restoring the city to its original grandeur, or indeed to any satisfactory reconstruction at all, was thought of for centuries. In the extreme commotion of affairs, and the long struggle of the Popes with the Emperors, there was neither leisure nor means for any great scheme of this kind, nor much thought of the material framework of the city, while every mind was bent upon establis.h.i.+ng its moral position and lofty standing ground among the nations. As much as was indispensable would be done: but in these days the requirements of the people in respect to their lodging were few: as indeed they still are to an extraordinary extent in Italy, where life is so much carried on out of doors.

It is evident, however, that Rome the city had never yet become the object of any man's life or ambition, or that a thought of anything beyond what was needful for actual use, for shelter or defence, had entered into the thoughts of its masters when the Papal Court returned from Avignon. The churches alone were cared for now and then, and decorated whenever possible with rich hangings, with marbles and ancient columns generally taken from cla.s.sical buildings, sometimes even from churches of an older date; but even so late as the time of Petrarch so important a building as St. John Lateran, the Papal church _par excellence_, lay roofless and half ruined, in such a state that it was impossible to say ma.s.s in it. The poet describes Rome itself, when, after a long walk amid all the relics of the cla.s.sical ages, his friend and he sat down to rest upon the ruined arches of the Baths of Diocletian, and gazed upon the city at their feet--"the spectacle of these grand ruins." "If she once began to recognise of herself the low estate in which she lies, Rome would make her own resurrection," he says with a confidence but poorly merited by the factious and restless city. But Rome, torn asunder by the feuds of Colonna and Orsini, seizing every occasion to do battle with her Pope, only faithful to him in his absence, of which she complained to heaven and earth--was little likely to exert herself to any such end.

This was the unfortunate plight in which Rome lay when Martin V., a Roman of the house of Colonna, came back in the year 1421, with all the treasures of art acquired by the Popes during their stay in France, to the shrine of the Apostles. The historian Platina, whose records are so full of life when they approach the period of which he had the knowledge of a contemporary, gives a wonderful description of her. "He found Rome," says the biographer of the Popes, "in such ruin that it bore no longer the aspect of a city but rather of a desert.

Everything was on the way to complete destruction. The churches were in ruins, the country abandoned, the streets in evil state, and an extreme penury reigned everywhere. In fact it had no appearance of a city or a sign of civilisation. The good Pontiff, moved by the sight of such calamity, gave his mind to the work of adorning and embellis.h.i.+ng the city, and reforming the corrupt ways into which it had fallen, which in a short time were so improved by his care that not only Supreme Pontiff but father of his country he was called by all. He rebuilt the portico of St. Peter's which had been falling into ruins, and completed the mosaic work of the pavement of the Lateran which he covered with fine works, and began that beautiful picture which was made by Gentile, the excellent painter." He also repaired the palace of the twelve Apostles, so that it became habitable. The Cardinals in imitation of him executed similar works in the churches from which each took his t.i.tle, and by this means the city began to recover decency and possible comfort at least, if as yet little of its ancient splendour.

"As soon as Pope Martin arrived in Rome," says the chronicle, _Diarium Romanum_, of Infessura, "he began to administer justice, for Rome was very corrupt and full of thieves. He took thought for everything, and especially to those robbers who were outside the walls, and who robbed the poor pilgrims who came for the pardon of their sins to Rome." The painter above mentioned, and who suggests to us the name of a greater than he, would appear to have been Gentile da Fabriano, who seems to have been employed by the Pope at a regular yearly salary. These good deeds of Pope Martin are a little neutralised by the fact that he gave a formal permission to certain other of his workmen to take whatever marbles and stones might be wanted for the pavement of the Lateran, virtually wherever they happened to find them, but especially from ruined churches both within and outside of the city.

Eugenius IV., who succeeded Pope Martin in the year 1431, was a man who loved above all things to "guerrare e murare"--to make war and to build--a splendid and n.o.ble Venetian, whose fine and commanding person fills one of his biographers, a certain Florentine bookseller and book-collector, called Vespasiano, with a rapture of admiration which becomes almost lyrical, in the midst of his simple and garrulous story.

"He was tall in person, beautiful of countenance, slender and serious, and so venerable to behold that there was no one, by reason of the great authority that was in him, who could look him in the face. It happened one evening that an important personage went to speak with him, who stood with his head bowed, never raising his eyes, in such a way that the Pope perceived it and asked him why he so bowed his head. He answered quickly that the Pope had such an aspect by nature that none dared meet his eye. I myself recollect often to have seen the Pope with his Cardinals upon a balcony near the door of the cloisters of Sta Maria Novella (in Florence) when the Piazza de Sta Maria Novella was full of people, and not only the Piazza, but all the streets that led into it. And such was the devotion of the people that they stood entranced (_stupefatti_) to see him, not hearing any one who spoke, but turning every one towards the Pontiff: and when he began according to the custom of the Pope to say the _Adjutorium nostrum in nomine Domini_ the Piazza was full of weeping and cries, appealing to the mercy of G.o.d for the great devotion they bore towards his Holiness. It appeared indeed that this people saw in him not only the vicar of Christ on earth, but the reflection of His true Divinity. His Holiness showed such great devotion, and also all his Cardinals round him, who were all men of great authority, that veritably at that moment he appeared that which he represented."

There is much refreshment to the soul in the biographies of Vespasiano, who was no more than a Florentine bookseller as we have said, greatly employed in collecting ancient ma.n.u.scripts, which was the special taste of the time, with a hand in the formation of all the libraries then being established, and in consequence a considerable acquaintance with great personages, those at least who were patrons of the arts and had a literary turn. Pope Eugenius is not in ordinary history a highly attractive character, and the general records of the Papacy are not such as to allure the mind as with ready discovery of unknown friends. But the two Popes whom the old bookman chronicles, rise before us in the freshest colours, the first in stately serenity and austerity of mien, dazzling in his _aspetto di natura_, as Moses when he came from the presence of G.o.d--moving all hearts when he raised his voice in the prayers of the Church, every listener hanging on his breath, the crowd gazing at him overwhelmed as if upon Him whom the Pope represented, though no man dared face his penetrating eyes.

It is a great thing for the most magnificent potentate to have such a biographer as our bookseller. Eugenius was as kind as he was splendid, according to Vespasiano. One day a poor gentleman reduced to want went to the Pope, appealing for charity "being in exile, poor, and _fuori della patria_," words which are more touching than their English synonyms, out of his country, banished from all his belongings: an evil which went to the very hearts of those who were themselves at any moment subject to that fate, and to whom _la patria_ meant an ungrateful fierce native city--never certain in its temper from one moment to another. The Pope sent for a purse full of florins, and bade the exile take from it as much as he wanted. "Felice, abashed, put in his hand timidly, when the Pope turned to him laughing and said, 'Put in your hand freely, I give it to you willingly.'" This being his disposition we need not wonder that Vespasian adds:--"He never had much supply of money in the house; according as he had it, quickly he expended it." Remembering what lies before us in history (but not in this broken record of men), soon to be filled with Borgias and such like, the reader would do well to sweeten his thoughts on the edge of the horrors of the Renaissance, with Vespasian's kind and humane tales. Platina takes up the story in a different tone.

"Among other things Eugenius, in order that it might not seem that he thought of nothing but fighting (his wars were perpetual, _guerrare_ winning the day over _murare_; he built like Nehemiah with the sword in his other hand), canonized S. Nicola di Tolentino of the order of S.

Augustine, who did many miracles. He built the portico which leads from the Church of the Lateran to the Sancta Sanctorum, and remade and enlarged the cloister inhabited by the priests, and completed the picture of the Church begun under Martin by Gentile. He was not easily moved by wrath, or personal offence, and never spoke evil of any man, neither by word of mouth nor hand of write. He was gracious to all the schools, specially to those of Rome, where he desired to see every kind of literature and doctrine flourish. He himself had little literature, but much knowledge, especially of history. He had a great love for monks, and was very generous to them, and was also a great lover of war, a thing which seems marvellous in a Pope. He was very faithful to the engagements he made--unless when he saw that it was more expedient to revoke a promise than to fulfil it."

Martin and Eugenius were both busy and warlike men. They were involved in all the countless internal conflicts of Italy; they were confronted by many troubles in the Church, by the argumentative and persistent Council of Bale, and an anti-Pope or two to increase their cares. The reign of Eugenius began by a flight from Rome with one attendant, from the mob who threatened his life. Nevertheless it was in these agitated days that the first thought of Rome rebuilt, as glorious as a bride, more beautiful than in her climax of cla.s.sic splendour, began to enter into men's thoughts.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FOUNTAIN OF TREVI.

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The reign of their immediate successor, the learned and magnificent Nicolas V., who was created Pope in 1447, was, however, the actual era of this new conception. It is not necessary, we are thankful to think, to enter here into any description of the Renaissance, that age so splendid in art, so horrible in history--when every vice seemed let loose on the earth, yet the evil demons so draped themselves in everything beautiful, that they often attained their most dangerous and terrible aspect, that of angels of light. The Renaissance has had more than its share in history; it has flooded the world with scandals of every kind, and such examples of depravity as are scarcely to be found in any other age; or perhaps it is that no other age has commanded the same contrasts and incongruities, the same picturesque accessories, the splendour and external grace, the swing of careless force and franchise, without restraint and without shame. To many minds these things themselves are enough to attract and to dazzle, and they have captivated many writers to whom the brilliant society, the triumphs of art, the ever s.h.i.+fting, ever glittering panorama with its startling succession of scenes, spectacles, splendours, and tragedies, have made the more serious and more worthy records of life appear sombre, and its n.o.bler motives dull in comparison. When Thomas of Sarzana was born in Pisa--in a humble house of peasants who had no surname nor other distinction, but who managed to secure for him the education which was sufficiently easy in those days for boys destined to the priesthood--the age of the Renaissance was coming into full flower. Literature and learning, the pursuit of ancient ma.n.u.scripts, the wors.h.i.+p of Greece and the overwhelming influence of its language and masterpieces, were the inspiration of the age, so far as matters intellectual were concerned. To read and collate and copy was the special occupation of the literary cla.s.s. If they attempted any original work, it was a commentary: and a Latin couplet, an epigram, was the highest effort of imagination which they permitted themselves. The day of Dante and Petrarch was over. No one cared to be _volgarizzato_--brought down in plain Italian to the knowledge of common men. The language of their literary traffic was Latin, the object of their adoration Greek. To read, and yet to read, and again to go on reading, was the occupation of every man who desired to make himself known in the narrow circles of literature; and a small attendant world of scribes was maintained in every learned household, and accompanied the path of every scholar. The world so far as its books went had gone back to a period in which G.o.ds and men were alike different from those of the existing generation; and the living age, disgusted with its own unsatisfactory conditions, attempted to gain dignity and beauty by pranking itself in the ill-adapted robes of a life totally different from its own.

Between the cla.s.sical ages and the Christian there must always be the great gulf fixed of this complete difference of sentiment and of atmosphere. And the wonderful contradiction was more marked than usual in Rome of a world devoted outside to the rites and ceremonies of religion, while dwelling in its intellectual sphere in the air of a region to which Christianity was unknown. The routine of devotion never relaxing--planned out for every hour of every day, calling for constant attention, constant performance, avowedly addressing itself not to the learned or wise, avowedly restricting itself in all those enjoyments of life which were the first and greatest of objects in the order of the ancient ages--yet carried on by votaries of the Muses, to whom Jove and Apollo were more attractive than any Christian ideal--must have made an unceasing and bewildering conflict in the minds of men. No doubt that conflict, and the evident certainty that one or the other must be wrong, along with the strong setting of that tide of fas.h.i.+on which is so hard to be resisted, towards the less exacting creed, had much to do with the fever of the time. Yet the curious equalising touch of common life, the established order whatever it may be, against which only one here and there ever successfully rebels, made the strange conjunction possible; and the final conflict abided its time. Such a man as Nicolas V. might indeed fill his palace with scholars and scribes, and put his greatest pride in his ma.n.u.scripts: but the affairs of life around were too urgent to affect his own const.i.tution as Pope and priest and man of his time. He bandied epigrams with his learned convives in his moments of leisure: but he had himself too much to do to fall into dilettante heathenism.

Perhaps the ma.n.u.scripts themselves, the glory of possessing them, the busy scribes all labouring for that high end of instructing the world: while courtiers never slow to catch the tone that pleased, celebrated their sovereign as the head of humane and liberal study as well as of the Church--may have been more to Nicolas than all his MSS. contained.

He remained quite sincere in his ma.s.s, quite simple in his life, notwithstanding the influx of the heathen element: and most likely took no note in his much occupied career of the great distance that lay between.

Nicolas V. was the first of those Pontiffs who are the pride of modern Rome--the men who, by a strange provision, or as it almost seems neglect of Providence, appear in the foremost places of the Church pre-occupied with secondary matters, when they ought to have been preparing for that great Revolution which, it was once fondly hoped, was to lay spiritual Rome in ruins, at the very moment when material Rome rose most gloriously from her ashes. But, notwithstanding that he was still troubled by that long-drawn-out Council of Bale, it does not seem that any such shadow was in the mind of Nicolas. He stood calm in human unconsciousness between heathendom at his back, and the Reformation in front of him, going about his daily work thinking of nothing, as the majority of men even on the eve of the greatest of revolutions so constantly do. Nicolas was, like so many of the great Popes, a poor man's son, without a surname, Thomas of Sarzana taking his name from the village in which he was brought up. He had the good fortune, which in those days was so possible to a scholar, recommended originally by his learning alone, to rise from post to post in the household of bishop and Cardinal until he arrived at that of the Pope, where a man of real value was highly estimated, and where it was above all things important to have a steadfast and faithful envoy, one who could be trusted with the often delicate negotiations of the Holy See, and who would neither be daunted nor led astray by imperial caresses or the frowns of power.

"He was very learned, _dottissimo_, in philosophy, and master of all the arts. There were few writers in Greek or in Latin of any kind that he had not read their works, and he had the whole of the Bible in his memory, and quoted from it continually. This intimate knowledge of the Holy Scriptures gave the greatest honour to his pontificate and the answers he was called upon to make." There were great hopes in those days of the reunion of the Greek Church with the Latin, an object much in the mind of all the greater Popes: to promote which happy possibility Pope Eugenius called a Council in Ferrara in 1438, which was also intended to confound the rebellious and heretical Council of Bale, as well as to bring about, if possible, the desired union. The Emperor of the East was there in person, along with the patriarch and a large following; and it was in this a.s.sembly that Thomas of Sarzana, then secretary and counsellor of the Cardinal di Santa Croce--who had accompanied his Cardinal over _i monti_ on a mission to the King of France from which he had just returned--made himself known to Christendom as a fine debater and accomplished student. The question chiefly discussed in the Council of Ferrara was that which is formally called the Procession of the Holy Spirit, the doctrine which has always stood between the two Churches, and prevented mutual understanding.