more learning than was common among the unlettered Romans.

He met with no adventures; for though the highways in the country
swarmed with robbers always on the watch for a merchant's train or for
a rich traveller, yet within the city's limits, small as was the
authority of the Senate and of the Prefect, thieves dared not band
together in numbers, and no two or three of them would have cared to
come to blows with Gilbert and his men.

Nor did he make friends in Rome. His first intention had been to
present himself to the principal baron in the city, as a traveller of
good birth, and to request the advantages of friendship and protection;
and so he would have done in any other European city. But he had soon
learned that Rome was far behind the rest of the world in the social
practices of chivalry, and that in placing himself under a Roman
baron's protection he would, to all intents and purposes, be taking
service instead of accepting hospitality. Even so, he might have been
willing to take such a position for the sake of adventure; yet he could
by no means make up his mind to a choice between the half-Jewish
Pierleoni and the rough-mannered Frangipani. To the red-handed
Crescenzi he would not go; the Colonna of that time were established on
the heights of Tusculum, and the Orsini, friends to the Pope, had
withdrawn to distant Galera, in the fever-haunted marsh northwest of
Rome.

But here and there he made the acquaintance of a priest or a monk whose
learned conversation harmonized with his thoughts and helped the grave
illusion in which--perhaps out of sheer idleness--he loved to think
himself back in the abbey in England. And so he led a life unlike the
lives around him, and many of the people in the quarter learned to know