power to propose that great federative league with the Italian States
which would, as he rightly said, have raised Rome to the indisputable
head of European nations. Under his rule trade was secure, literature
was welcome, art began to rise.

On the other hand, the prosperity which made more apparent his justice,
his integrity, his patriotism, his virtues, and his genius, brought out
no less glaringly his arrogant consciousness of superiority, his love of
display, and the wild and daring insolence of his ambition. Though
too just to avenge himself by retaliating on the patricians their
own violence, though, in his troubled and stormy tribuneship, not one
unmerited or illegal execution of baron or citizen could be alleged
against him, even by his enemies; yet sharing, less excusably, the
weakness of Nina, he could not deny his proud heart the pleasure of
humiliating those who had ridiculed him as a buffoon, despised him as a
plebeian, and who, even now slaves to his face, were cynics behind his
back. "They stood before him while he sate," says his biographer; "all
these Barons, bareheaded; their hands crossed on their breasts;
their looks downcast;--oh, how frightened they were!"--a picture more
disgraceful to the servile cowardice of the nobles than the haughty
sternness of the Tribune. It might be that he deemed it policy to break
the spirit of his foes, and to awe those whom it was a vain hope to
conciliate.

For his pomp there was a greater excuse: it was the custom of the time;
it was the insignia and witness of power; and when the modern historian
taunts him with not imitating the simplicity of an ancient tribune, the
sneer betrays an ignorance of the spirit of the age, and the vain
people whom the chief magistrate was to govern. No doubt his gorgeous
festivals, his solemn processions, set off and ennobled--if parade can