He had learned from Gamba that Crescenti was a faithful parish priest as well as an assiduous scholar, but he saw that the librarian’s beneficence took that purely personal form which may coexist with a serene acceptance of the general evils underlying particular hardships.  His charities were performed in the old unquestioning spirit of the Roman distribution of corn; and doubtless the good man who carries his loaf of bread and his word of hope into his neighbour’s hovel reaps a more tangible return than the lonely thinker who schemes to undermine the strongholds of injustice.  Still there was a perplexing contrast between the superficiality of Crescenti’s moral judgments and the breadth and penetration of his historic conceptions.  Odo was too inexperienced to reflect that a man’s sense of the urgency of improvement lies mainly in the line of his talent:  as the merchant is persuaded that the roads most in need of mending are those on which his business makes him travel.  Odo himself was already conscious of living in a many-windowed house, with outlooks diverse enough to justify more than one view of the universe; but he had no conception of that concentration of purpose that may make the mind’s flight to its goal as direct and unvarying as the course of a homing bird.  The talk turning on Gamba, Crescenti spoke of the help which the hunchback gave him in his work among the poor.

“His early hardships,” said he, “have given him an insight into character that my happier circumstances have denied me; and he has more than once been the means of reclaiming some wretch that I despaired of.  Unhappily, his parts and learning are beyond his station, and will not let him rest in the performance of his duties.  His mind, I often tell him, is like one of those inn parlours hung with elaborate maps of the three Heretical Cities; whereas the only topography with which the virtuous traveller need be acquainted is that of the Heavenly City to which all our journeyings should tend.  The soundness of his heart reassures me as to this distemper of the reason; but others are less familiar with his good qualities and I tremble for the risks to which his rashness may expose him.”

The librarian went on to say that Gamba had a pretty poetical gift which he was suspected of employing in the composition of anonymous satires on the court, the government and the Church.  At that period every Italian town was as full of lampoons as a marsh of mosquitoes, and it was as difficult in the one case as the other for the sufferer to detect the specific cause of his sting.  The moment in Italy was a strange one.  The tide of reform had been turned back by the very act devised to hasten it:  the suppression of the Society of Jesus.  The shout of liberation that rose over the downfall of the order had sunk to a guarded whisper.  The dark legend already forming around Ganganelli’s death, the hint of that secret liquor distilled for the order’s use in a certain convent of Perugia, hung like a menace on the political horizon; and the disbanded Society seemed to have tightened its hold on the public conscience as a dying man’s clutch closes on his victorious enemy.