"This is a man who has learned the people by heart," observed Montreal
to Adrian. "He knows he must speak to the eye, in order to win the mind:
a knave,--a wise knave!"

And now Rienzi had ascended the scaffold; and as he looked long and
steadfastly around the meeting, the high and thoughtful repose of
his majestic countenance, its deep and solemn gravity, hushed all the
murmurs, and made its effect equally felt by the sneering nobles as the
impatient populace.

"Signors of Rome," said he, at length, "and ye, friends, and citizens,
you have heard why we are met together this day; and you, my Lord
Bishop of Orvietto,--and ye, fellow labourers with me in the field of
letters,--ye, too, are aware that it is upon some matter relative to
that ancient Rome, the rise and the decline of whose past power and
glories we have spent our youth in endeavouring to comprehend. But
this, believe me, is no vain enigma of erudition, useful but to the
studious,--referring but to the dead. Let the Past perish!--let darkness
shroud it!--let it sleep for ever over the crumbling temples and
desolate tombs of its forgotten sons,--if it cannot afford us, from
its disburied secrets, a guide for the Present and the Future. What, my
Lords, ye have thought that it was for the sake of antiquity alone that
we have wasted our nights and days in studying what antiquity can teach
us! You are mistaken; it is nothing to know what we have been, unless it
is with the desire of knowing that which we ought to be. Our ancestors
are mere dust and ashes, save when they speak to our posterity; and then
their voices resound, not from the earth below, but the heaven above.
There is an eloquence in Memory, because it is the nurse of Hope.
There is a sanctity in the Past, but only because of the chronicles it