The anti-Christian prejudices, which Julian participated with others, would be thenceforth intensified by his most charming recollections.

Can we wonder that, when Julian was summoned from Athens, he raised his hands in prayer to the Minerva of the Parthenium, and besought her to protect him, her devoted servant? It is not my purpose to recount his perseverance. He ascended, as you know, the throne of Constantius. He became the restorer of the ancient religion. He revived the ancient classic usages. He officiated as Supreme Pontiff. He fasted in honour of Pan and Mercury. He arbitrated between Corinth and Argos on the restitution of the Isthmian games. He officiated himself at the Pagan altars, and he imagined that he was visited by the Genius of the Empire; that he had communications from the gods; that, like Numa or Achilles, he could distinguish their voices. He himself attempted to emulate the heroes of Homer, while he wrote treatises against Christianity in the interest of the followers of Plato. He supplanted the Christian bishops by rhetoricians and philosophers. With a literary leaning to sophists and charlatans he combined the manly bearing of a Roman general; and he died with the equanimity of a Greek sage, when arrested in the highest triumph of a Greek warrior, retaliating invasion upon the soil of the barbarian.

Concurrently with his effort to restore the ancient creed he exemplified in his person the antique virtues. And yet, as I said, in spite of these assumed proofs of his sincerity, he maintained this creed without any definite conviction of its truth, and without any reasonable hope of success.

How could he possess a definite conviction of polytheism when he acknowledged the original unity of the Divine being? In spite of his Neo-Platonic mysticism, he had a philosophical tendency to freedom of thought. I find that, notwithstanding his patronage of augury, he could himself defy augury if need were. As Libanius says, on such occa

JULIAN'S DISAPPOINTMENTS.

51

sions, "he was himself his own Pythia ;" and otherwise he showed symptoms of a mental confusion, such as that illustrated in the edicts of Constantine to consult the augurs and observe the Christian Sunday. He was involuntarily an emblem of the entire conflict, while he considered himself as representing only one of its parties.

Again I say that Julian had no reasonable hope of success. His efforts exposed him to the ridicule of the higher classes, and he had frequent occasions, says Gibbon, "to complain of the want of fervour of his own party." His sacrifices of oxen were welcome enough to the hungry legionaries who feasted on their remains, but Julian obtained otherwise no hearty support, and he was conscious of this. He has recorded, for instance, his disappointment at the grove of Daphne in these words "I hastened from the temple of Jupiter to the sacred grove, in the hope that I should there be gratified with the greatest display of your riches and your love of show. I already pictured to myself the festive processions, and saw, by anticipation, the victims and the holy choirs, the rows of youths attuning their voices in honour of the god, and dressed in garments of dazzling whiteness. But when I entered the grove, I saw no burning of incense, no wafer-cakes, no victims! I was at first amazed, though I endeavoured to believe they were only on the outer skirts of the grove, waiting, out of compliment to me, as the Pontiff Maximus, for a signal from me for their entrance. When, however, I inquired of the priest, 'What offering does the city intend to bring to-day in honour of the annual festival of the god?' he answered me, I bring from my own house a goose as an offering to Apollo, but the city has prepared nothing for him!"" Julian's disappointment at the solitary goose was not consoled by the reflection that there might possibly be another goose in the vicinity.

My conclusion is, that Julian was striving against the current, in the attempt to mould his age according to a notion

he had conceived from history. I shall have something more to say about him presently, but I will first mention some other examples of the very same tendency; and the next that occurs to me is Nicholas di Rienzo.

Rienzi, as he is called, was, like Julian, the type of a class, and the exponent of sentiments which he shared in common with such men as Arnold of Brescia, Petrarch, and Porcaro. These sentiments were conceived in connection with the revival of learning, and produced the attempt to invest modern Rome with certain of the attributes of the ancient Republic.

We may have some little difficulty in understanding such an attempt. In these days we have no parallel to the absorbing ardour excited by the recovery of ancient literature in the fifteenth century. The scholars of this Renaissance were a set of glorious fanatics. The loss of a single chest of manuscripts turned the hair of Guarino gray in a night. When Leontius was drowned, Petrarch, as became him, was painfully affected by the loss of his friend, but he was still more distressed at the loss of his friend's Euripides, which had descended with him to the bottom of the sea.

If it is difficult to conceive the moral exaltation of these early scholars, it is quite as hard to realise their social preeminence. We have no parallel at this day to the paramount influence which they exercised in the political system of Europe. As councillors of princes, as negotiators of empire, as diplomatists and ambassadors, the world was at their disposal. Their position was determined when Petrarch was crowned in the Capitol. It was consistent, therefore, that they should expect the world to be influenced by the sentiments which exerted so powerful an influence on themselves -that it should be swayed by the ideas which so despotically swayed them.

The explanation of Rienzi's career is thus perfectly easy, if we look at the surrounding circumstances. With a scholar's

ardour and a scholar's pride he had more than his share of a scholar's illusions. He was nurtured under influences which tended to exaggerate the impressions of his class. In the Eternal City he was surrounded by monuments of the most suggestive character. The ancient historians, the manuscripts, and marbles excited his imagination; and, as we learn from Gibbon, he was in the habit of exclaiming, "Where are now these Romans? their virtue, their justice, their power? why was I not born in those happy times?" His aspirations illogically ripened into a project. When he had lifted the cover of the antique urn and viewed the relics of the departed greatness, he conceived that there might be fire lingering among the ashes. Then he formed the conclusion that his breath could call into life the Roman republic; and on that assumption he engaged in the attempt—the hopeless attempt -to resuscitate the dead.

I have no more space for Rienzi's history than for Julian's; nor do I need to dwell upon more than an incident or two of his most remarkable and dramatic history. "Rienzi" (I am quoting a phrase of Sismondi which reads like a sarcasm) "had not the spirit of a Roman warrior. He did not find in himself that valour which he admired in the ancients." And accordingly he did not prove equal to the part he had assumed. He was in fact more of an artist than a hero. He was for renewing the forms of ancient in the spirit of modern Italy. His first invocation to revolt was the exhibition of a picture,-insurrection recommended artistically by illustrations. Again, in the year 1348, when his power was on the wane, according to the Abbé de Sade, he caused an angel bearing the arms of Rome, to be painted on the walls of the church of St. Mary Magdalen, and this angel to be represented as holding in one hand a cross surmounted by a dove, and treading under foot an asp, a basilisk, a lion, and a dragon. Waiting to know the effect of this device as against his enemies, when he saw that the

people covered it with mud, he comprehended that his ascendency was over and fled to Naples. His fall had been accelerated by the paucity of his resources. His principal expedient in time of difficulty was to ring the town bell, and when that failed him, he was prostrate. He had thought to found a second Rome by relying on what the first Rome most despised-its mob. Retribution came at length in a terrible hour, when, after his return and second fall, he had himself to confront this mob at the foot of the staircase of the Capitol. The scene as described by Sismondi, of impending vengeance, but of mutual suspense, is one of the most striking in Italian history.

This impressive catastrophe could not disabuse Petrarch of his predilection for revivals. If he was disappointed of a Tribune, he was nevertheless willing to put up with an Augustus. He was indifferent to the master, provided it was an antique. There is a long and amusing account of Petrarch's endeavours and fruitless negotiations to induce the emperor to reside in Rome. But the emperor was

more concerned for his own convenience than for Petrarch's theories, and the design of the elegant pedant was never accomplished. It is worthy of remark how repeatedly these conceptions of Petrarch and Rienzi have reappeared in Italian history. Even at the revolution of 1848, in numerous instances, the ancient formula were still influential; sedition asserted its derivation from the Gracchi, and the assassin who struck Rome's most able statesman was compared in the popular imagination to the Brutus who stabbed Cæsar.

An artistic people like the Italian is more than ordinarily prone to this kind of imitation, but it is not their characteristic exclusively, as the next example I shall cite sufficiently proves, for it belongs to our own more sober history.

Probably no one at first thought would dream of accusing the heavy English Puritans of the seventeenth century of a