the delicacies of every clime, when the wine most freely circled, the
Tribune himself preserved a temperate and even rigid abstinence. ("Vita
di Cola di Rienzi".--The biographer praises the abstinence of the
Tribune.) While the apartments of state and the chamber of his bride
were adorned with a profuse luxury and cost, to his own private rooms he
transported precisely the same furniture which had been familiar to him
in his obscurer life. The books, the busts, the reliefs, the arms which
had inspired him heretofore with the visions of the past, were endeared
by associations which he did not care to forego.

But that which constituted the most singular feature of his character,
and which still wraps all around him in a certain mystery, was his
religious enthusiasm. The daring but wild doctrines of Arnold of
Brescia, who, two centuries anterior, had preached reform, but
inculcated mysticism, still lingered in Rome, and had in earlier youth
deeply coloured the mind of Rienzi; and as I have before observed,
his youthful propensity to dreamy thought, the melancholy death of his
brother, his own various but successful fortunes, had all contributed
to nurse the more zealous and solemn aspirations of this remarkable
man. Like Arnold of Brescia, his faith bore a strong resemblance to the
intense fanaticism of our own Puritans of the Civil War, as if similar
political circumstances conduced to similar religious sentiments. He
believed himself inspired by awful and mighty commune with beings of the
better world. Saints and angels ministered to his dreams; and without
this, the more profound and hallowed enthusiasm, he might never
have been sufficiently emboldened by mere human patriotism, to
his unprecedented enterprise: it was the secret of much of his
greatness,--many of his errors. Like all men who are thus self-deluded
by a vain but not inglorious superstition, united with, and coloured by,
earthly ambition, it is impossible to say how far he was the visionary,