Upon the coldness thus generated, other influences were brought coincidently to bear. The Colonna and the Orsini had long been most prominent and influential among the great barons of Rome. The authority which they exercised over their fiefs in the Campagna was to all intents sovereign. They alternately wasted that fair land with their mutual broils, or bearded their ecclesiastical over-lord in his capital. Those who have journeyed from Monterosi to Albano along the lonely plain which, curtained by the Sabine mountains and the Alban hills, stretches far around the Eternal City, or have cantered for miles and miles across its vast expanse of undulating sward in solitude and stillness; who have marked its rich vegetation running wild in the most genial of European climes, its melancholy lines of interrupted aqueducts witnessing to a long-degraded civilisation, its distant and dilapidated watch-towers telling only of former forays, its few isolated dwellings sheltering beneath crumbled walls and broken battlements the units of a scanty and squalid population; and who, to account for the spell of such a singular desolation, conclude that this dreary waste has been depopulated by the course of nature; such may wonder to hear that the mischief and misery are chiefly the act of man. The calm serenity of these forlorn downs becomes deeply touching from remembering that the soil was for centuries sodden with blood, and covered with smouldering ruins; that European civilisation there was nurtured, there waned, and there struggled into a second life, amid the din of battles, the devastation of armies, the rapine of banditti; that its long grass springs from the grave of ancient refinement, of classic memorials, of mediæval strife.