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Fra Morcale, the captain of the great Free Company. Out of the Bible and out of Livy he filled them with lofty notions of the greatness of Rome, and allured them by splendid promises of advancement. They lent him considerable sums of money, and they enabled him to borrow more. He appeared, accompanied by these youths, and in a magnificent dress,* before the legate, and requested to be invested in the dignity of senator of Rome. At that time the papal authority in Rome was still unacknowledged by the factious nobles. It seemed a favourable opportunity; and in the name of the Church Albornoz appointed Rienzi senator of Rome. With a few troops Rienzi advanced; and in a short time was once more master of the scene of his former power and glory. But Rienzi had not learned wisdom. The intoxication of power again bewildered his reason; he returned to his old pomp, his old luxury. He extorted the restoration of his confiscated property, and wasted it in idle expenditure. He was constantly encircled by his armed guard; he passed his time in drunken banquets.t Again called on to show his military prowess against the refractory Colonnas, he was again. found wanting. The stern and equal vigour which had before given an imposing majesty to his wild justice, now seemed to turn to caprice and wantonness of power. His great measure, by which he seemed determined, this time at least, to escape the imputation of pusillanimity as shrinking from the extermination of his enemies, was tainted with treachery and ingratitude. The execution of Fra Morcale, the brother of the youths to whom he had been so deeply indebted, revolted rather than awed the public mind. The second government of Rienzi was an unmitigated tyranny; and ended by his murder in a popular insurrection. With the cry of Long live the people,' was now mingled 'Death to the tribune, to the traitor Rienzi!' His body was treated with the most shameful indignities.

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There is much good sense in Dr. Papencordt's simple expression, that Rienzi was an extraordinary rather than a great man.

The Roman biographer, who might appear to have been an eye-witness, describes his splendid attire with the most minute particularity.

+ The Roman biographer is again our authority. Before,' he says, 'he was sober, temperate, abstemious; he was now become an inordinate drunkard. He was always eating confectionery and drinking. It was a terrible thing to be forced to see him'horribile cosa era potere patire de vederlo,'-they said that in person he was formerly quite meagre, he had become enormously fat (grasso sterminatamente); he had a belly like a tun, jovial, like an Asiatic abbot!-'habea una ventresca tonna, trionfale, a modo de uno abbate Asiano! Another MS. reads abbate Asinino, which decorum will not allow us to translate. He was full of shining flesh (carbuncles?) like a peacock. Red, and with a long beard, his face was always changing; his eyes would suddenly kindle like fire. It was as changeable as his opinions. His understanding lightened in fitful flashes like fire-cosi se mutava suo intellecto come fuoco.' (Apud. Murator. Antiq. Ital. iii. p. 524.

His vigour of action fell short of his vigour of conception. He was a lofty idealist. That he could not accomplish his glorious visions, his times were partly in fault, and partly his own character. As long as his career was brilliant, imaginative, theatrical, he played his part with majesty; and even his magnificence might, as we observed, not have been impolitic; but when he had to strive with the rough realities of faction, to act on unimagined emergencies with vigour and promptitude, his mind seemed to give way-dignus imperii nisi imperâsset. In a warlike age, his want of military skill, and even of a soldier's courage, was a fatal deficiency. But if in action thus occasionally pusillanimous, his imaginative resources were inexhaustible. To his visions of political freedom, the supremacy of the dominion of Rome, and the independence of Italy, succeeded his religious dreamery, the predicted kingdom of the Holy Ghost. And we may give him the benefit of supposing that, even in his latter enterprise, when an instrument of the ecclesiastical power, he might honestly conceive himself labouring in the only practicable scheme for the peace and prosperity of Italy. Dazzling as was the course of Rienzi, and awakening all the generous sympathies, especially at the commencement of his career, even now arresting our attention amid the tumult and confusion of the dark ages in Italy, he bursts upon us, in our youth perhaps, even as he did upon his own age, as a hero and a patriot. And like his own age, and like Petrarch, the voice of that age, we are inclined to revenge, as it were, our disappointment at the failure of the hopes which he has excited by injustice to the lofty parts of his character. We do not allow him credit for what he did achieve under such adverse circumstances, from a kind of resentment that he achieved no more. We depreciate the good, the very transitory good which he did, because we justly feel that he was not a man who produced any permanent effect on the condition or destinies of man, but a fleeting and ephemeral pageant.

Of the merits of Dr. Papencordt's work we have not yet spoken. The expressions of our praise, we are sorry to say, must be mingled with those of regret. We have heard, since the commencement of our paper, that this promising pupil in the Berlin school of history has been suddenly cut off in the dawn of his literary reputation. Dr. Papencordt seemed likely to unite industry and diligence, general qualifications of German historians, with the virtues of judgment and skill in composition—which are not quite so common among them. We fear that his premature decease will deprive us of the work which he meditated, and of which the present monograph is, as it were, a chapter,

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the history of the city of Rome from the fall of the Western Empire to the commencement of the sixth century. But-his saltem donis-we would honour the memory of a writer who promised to attain to high eminence; and condole with the friends of, as we learn, a modest and estimable man.

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ART. VII-1. Russia under Nicholas the First. from a Supplement to the Conversations Lexicon, by Captain Anthony C. Sterling. London. 12mo. 1841.

2. Notes of a Half-pay in Search of Health; or, Russia, Circassia, and the Crimea in 1839-40. By Captain Jesse. 2 vols. 8vo. London, 1841.

3. Petersburg in Bildern und Skizzen. Dresden und Leipzig. 2 vols. 8vo. 1841.

Von J. G. Kohl.

N ARRATIVES of travels through Russia, and residences in various portions of that empire, all conveying, with more or less pretension, accounts of its present policy and prophecies of its future destiny, have been of late so plentifully supplied to the reading world, that general opinions of some kind must, we should think, be beginning to take shape and form. At all events, there must be a very general curiosity on the subject: the reporters in this department bid fair to become as numerous and multifarious as those from the Transatlantic shores. This time last year we noticed a cycle of Russian tourists-at Christmas we introduced the Letters from the Baltic,' which have since run through two editions—and now, aided by our friends the Germans, we again muster strong. However differing in country, character, principle, prejudice, and capacity, all these explorers seem to profess the same main object and end—namely, to ascertain what the actual progress of civilization in Russia has been: by what influences it has been most forwarded; and in what departments of life its results are most apparent.

Ever since the advent of Peter the Great, the great-great-grandsire of his present majesty, who breathed a species of animation into the vast colossus, but bequeathed to his successors the far more difficult task of wakening intelligence and stimulating conscience, civilisation, like the unknown god of the ancients, a something they acknowledged yet knew not how to approach, has been more or less the aim or the pretension of each succeeding sovereign. But no matter how they founded cities, or raised temples, or endowed institutions, ostensibly in her name, so long

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as the worship of the heart was wanting-so long as she was sought: not for herself, but for her concomitant gifts-civilisation in her real worth remained, as a matter of course, far from their grasp. Even granting their motives to have been pure, their devotion real, the object-in the degree they affected to secure it— was equally unattainable; for in the words of a great writer of the day,To think of engrafting, at once, on an ignorant people the fruits of long knowledge and civilisation-of importing among them ready-made those advantages and blessings which no nation ever attained but by its own working out, nor ever was fitted to enjoy but by having struggled for them-to harbour even a dream of the success of such an experiment implies a sanguineness almost incredible.'

Nevertheless, all these gigantic efforts-this enormous expenditure-these innumerable ukases in pen and ink-in brick and mortar-cannot have remained barren. Something good or bad must have accrued from such combined and continued exertion; and in our humble opinion the result is very much what from such premises might fairly have been anticipated: in a word, that after the lapse of more than a century-in the course of which the Russian power has been developed and extended in a degree unmatched in modern European history-throughout the country itself, as it stands, the work of corruption is found far a-head of that of civilisation, and both gradually reversing in position-the one, through all the glare and parade of advancement, visibly undermining the structure borrowed from other nationsthe other slowly impregnating the barbarous elements of the soil.

Impressed with this latter fact, we feel disposed to approach the Russian peasant with somewhat of the same respect as we should his czar-convinced that in these ranks lies that quarry of sterling materials from which alone the stepping-stones to Russian progression may be securely hewn. It may seem strange to say this of a class still in bondage, and more strange to speak openly of a system of serfage without as openly condemning it; but, even if Russia did not show us at every step the danger and futility of hasty changes and forced adoptions, we should be inclined to advocate the most cautious grant of that liberty which will only assimilate the serfs with other classes which have hitherto turned superior advantages to far inferior account. The peasantry of Russia are now strongly characterized by those qualities which legislators would be glad to retain in some more civilized countries, or infuse into others. At once active and tractable, intelligent and confiding—their affections more developed than their reason, their ingenuity far in advance of their knowledge-the voiceless and voteless worth of this estate in the political balance

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of Russia is as little suspected by the world in general as it is by themselves. Nevertheless it is to this class, almost exclusively, that Russia must look for the preservation of the sounder portions of her nationality-through this class it is that the sap of civilisation must rise; and it is worthy of remark that more has been done to waken the self-consciousness and moral energies of the people by their unanimous repulsion of the French invasion-(and the further we are removed from the barbarous features of this exertion the more shall we perceive its true dignity)—and more to humanise their habits and raise their ideas, by the return of the Russian troops from the allied armies-more, in short, to civilise them by these two national impulses, than by all the grafting and patching and mere outward applications upon the other classes of the empire, ever since the time of Peter the Great.

We thought it fair to state this general impression of ours on the threshold; but our immediate object is to make our readers acquainted with three very interesting books on Russia. certainly whoever wishes to prepare himself for studying with advantage either the new travellers on our list, or any other work of their class, ought to begin by mastering the skilful Essay compiled from the rich pages of the Conversations Lexicon,' for which we are indebted to Captain Sterling.

Its first chapter opens with a few general remarks on the tardiness of Russia in the career of improvement; on the manner in which she has been obliged to rush through or skip over many degrees of civilization in order to march in the same line with her rivals; proceeding with a short survey of the events which preceded the reign of the Emperor Nicholas; the vexations which met him on his ascending the throne; with a few allusions to his personal character, and a short sketch of the motives for his policy-to which we shall advert more at length. To these succeed a list of the administrative and diplomatic officers; the history of the Svod, or systematic collection of civil lawsa gigantic work, which dragged its weary length through the reigns of Catherine the Second, Paul, and Alexander, and was reserved for the youth and vigour of the present sovereign to recommence and finish;-and a comprehensive sketch of the state of trade, the condition of the peasants, and the increased facility of intercourse, &c. One of the most interesting portions is contained in the chapter on the war with the Circassians, the inefficiency of all the varied modes of battery which Russia has hitherto brought to bear upon them, and the little present prospect there appears of terminating this contest in the usual Russian sweeping mode. These remarks are followed by a masterly analysis of the relations of Russia with the various

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