the great hearts and the glorious epochs of the past.  For me—­to what cares I am wedded! to what labours I am bound! what instruments I must use! what disguises I must assume! to tricks and artifice I must bow my pride! base are my enemies—­uncertain my friends! and verily, in this struggle with blinded and mean men, the soul itself becomes warped and dwarfish.  Patient and darkling, the Means creep through caves and the soiling mire, to gain at last the light which is the End.”

In these reflections there was a truth, the whole gloom and sadness of which the Roman had not yet experienced.  However august be the object we propose to ourselves, every less worthy path we take to insure it distorts the mental sight of our ambition; and the means, by degrees, abase the end to their own standard.  This is the true misfortune of a man nobler than his age—­that the instruments he must use soil himself:  half he reforms his times; but half, too, the times will corrupt the reformer.  His own craft undermines his safety;—­the people, whom he himself accustoms to a false excitement, perpetually crave it; and when their ruler ceases to seduce their fancy, he falls their victim.  The reform he makes by these means is hollow and momentary—­it is swept away with himself:  it was but the trick—­the show—­the wasted genius of a conjuror:  the curtain falls—­the magic is over—­the cup and balls are kicked aside.  Better one slow step in enlightenment,—­which being made by the reason of a whole people, cannot recede,—­than these sudden flashes in the depth of the general night, which the darkness, by contrast doubly dark, swallows up everlastingly again!

As, slowly and musingly, Rienzi turned to quit the church, he felt a light touch upon his shoulder.

“Fair evening to you, Sir Scholar,” said a frank voice.

“To you, I return the courtesy,” answered Rienzi, gazing upon the person who thus suddenly accosted him, and in whose white cross and martial bearing the reader recognises the Knight of St. John.

“You know me not, I think?” said Montreal; “but that matters little, we may easily commence our acquaintance:  for me, indeed, I am fortunate enough to have made myself already acquainted with you.”

“Possibly we have met elsewhere, at the house of one of those nobles to whose rank you seem to belong?”

“Belong! no, not exactly!” returned Montreal, proudly.  “Highborn and great as your magnates deem themselves, I would not, while the mountains can yield one free spot for my footstep, change my place in the world’s many grades for theirs.  To the brave, there is but one sort of plebeian, and that is the coward.  But you, sage Rienzi,” continued the Knight, in a gayer tone, “I have seen in more stirring scenes than the hall of a Roman Baron.”

Rienzi glanced keenly at Montreal, who met his eye with an open brow.

“Yes!” resumed the Knight—­“but let us walk on; suffer me for a few moments to be your companion.  Yes!  I have listened to you—­the other eve, when you addressed the populace, and today, when you rebuked the nobles; and at midnight, too, not long since, when (your ear, fair Sir!—­lower, it is a secret!)—­at midnight, too, when you administered the oath of brotherhood to the bold conspirators, on the ruined Aventine!”