him by sight, and called him and his men 'the English'; and as most of
the people of Rome were very much occupied with their own affairs,
chiefly evil, Gilbert was allowed to live as he pleased. But for the
fact that even his well-filled purse must in the course of time be
exhausted, he might have spent the remainder of his life in the Lion
Inn, by the bridge, carelessly meditative and simply happy. But other
forces were at work to guide his life into other channels, and he had
reckoned ill when he had fancied, being himself unmoved, that the love
of such a woman as Queen Eleanor was a mere incident without
consequence, forgotten like a flower of last year's blossoming.

Several times during the winter and in the spring that followed, the
friar Arnold came to see him in his lodgings and talked of the great
things that were coming, of the redemption of man from man by the
tearing down of all sovereign power, whether of pope or emperor, or
king or prince, to make way for the millennium of a universal republic.
Then the fanatic's burning eyes flashed like beacons, his long arms
made sudden and wild gestures, his soft brown hair stood from his head
as though lifted by a passing breeze, and his whole being was
transfigured in the flash of his own eloquence. When he spoke to the
Romans with that voice and with that look, they rose quickly to a
tumult, as the sea under a gale, and he could guide them in their
storming to ends of destruction and terror. But there was no drop of
southern blood in Gilbert's veins nor anything to which the passionate
Italian's eloquence appealed. Instead of catching fire, he argued;
instead of joining Arnold in his attempt to turn the world into a
republic, he was more and more persuaded of the excellence of all he
had left behind him in the north. He incarnated that aristocratic
temper which has in all times, since Duke William crossed the water,
leavened the strong mass of the Anglo-Saxon character, balancing its