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Such were the vast schemes extending into yet wider fields of glory and conquest, bounded only by the Alps with which the Captain of the Grand Company beheld the columns and arches of the Seven-hilled City. No fear disturbed the long current of his thoughts. His brothers were the leaders of Rienzi's hireling army that army were his creatures. Over Rienzi himself he assumed the right of a creditor.

"Oh, wily and evasive: He is profuse in compliments and good wishes; but says he is under fealty to the Hungarian king, whose cause is before Rienzi's tribunal; that he cannot desert his present standard; that he fears Rome is so evenly balanced between patricians and the people, that whatever party would permanently be uppermost must call in a Podesta; and this character alone the Provencal insinuates would suit him."

Later on his style was to become more individual, more purely his own; but so far he had now got and it was a very long way. The pilgrims' chorus melody, which first appears in the overture, is, to my mind, very Weberesque. It is not particularly strong for Wagner and hardly bears the weight of the brass with which it is afterwards thundered out; but think of it and of Rienzi's prayer!

Preserving generally the real chronology of Rienzi's life, the plot of this work extends over a space of some years, and embraces the variety of characters necessary to a true delineation of events.

It has been translated into the Italian language by eminent writers; and the authorities for the new view of Rienzi's times and character which the Author deemed himself warranted to take, have been compared with his text by careful critics and illustrious scholars, in those states in which the work has been permitted to circulate.

The brothers of Montreal returned late at night with the intelligence, that the troopers of the Barons had secured themselves amidst the recesses of the wood of Pantano. The red spot mounted to Rienzi's brow. He gazed hard at Brettone, who stated the news to him, and a natural suspicion shot across his mind. "How! escaped!" he said. "Is it possible?

His abominable errors and deficiencies in his presentation of the part had never escaped me; he had never been able to lay aside his brilliant and heroic leading-tenor manners in order to render that gloomy demonic strain in Rienzi's temperament on which I had laid unmistakable stress at the critical points of the drama.

Petrarch conceived the highest opinion of him at their first meeting, and never withdrew his friendship from him to the end; the great poet joined his prayers with those of the Roman envoys, and supported Rienzi's eloquence with his own genius in a Latin poem. But nothing could avail to move the Pope.

Whatever Rienzi's sins, whatever his unpopularity, their freedom, their laws, their republic, were at stake; and these they surrendered to one hundred and fifty hirelings! This is the fact that damns them! But Rienzi was not unpopular when he addressed and conjured them: they found no fault with him.

Nicholas Rienzi's mother was handsome, and from her he inherited the beauty of form and feature for which he was famous in his youth. His gifts of mind were many, varied and full of that exuberant vitality which noble lineage rarely transmits; if he was a man of genius, his genius belonged to that order which is never far removed from madness and always akin to folly.