sleep of the Middle Ages, was removed from the severe simplicity that gave its strength to ancient Rome. Along those giddy parapets of fame we watch Rienzi walking through his months of glory like a somnambule sustained by an internal dream. That he should fall was inevitable. With him expired the Utopia of a Roman commonwealth, to be from time to time revived as an ineffectual fancy in the brains of a few visionaries.[108] [Footnote 108: Stefano Porcari, for example. See Vol. I., _Age of the Despots_, pp. 296, 302.] The relations of Petrarch to Rienzi offer matter for curious reflection, while they illustrate the part played by the enthusiasm for ancient Rome in the early history of humanism. Petrarch and Rienzi had been friends and correspondents before the emergence of the latter into public notice; and when the Tribune seemed about to satisfy the dearest desire of the poet's heart by re-establishing the Roman commonwealth, Petrarch addressed him with an animated letter of congratulation and encouragement.[109] In his charmed eyes he seemed a hero, _vir magnanimus_, worthy of the ancient world, a new Romulus, a third Brutus, a Camillus. The Roman burghers, that scum and sediment of countless races, barbarised by the lingering miseries of the Middle Ages, needed nothing, it appeared, but words and wishes to make them once again _cives Romani_, no longer clamorous for bread and games, but ready to reconquer all their ancestors had lost.[110] 'Where,' cried Petrarch, 'can the empire of the world be found, except in Rome? Who can dispute the Roman right? What force can stand against the name of Romans?' Neither the patriot nor the scholar discerned that the revival they were destined to inaugurate was intellectual. Though the spirit of the times refused a political Renaissance, refused to Italy the maintenance of even such freedom as she then possessed, far more refused a resuscitation of ancient Rome's imperial sway, yet both Rienzi and Petrarch persisted in believing that, because they glowed with fervour for the past, because they could read inscriptions, because they expressed their desires eloquently, the world's great age was certain to begin anew. It was a capital fault of the Renaissance to imagine that words could work wonders, that a rhetorician's _stylus_ might become the wand of Prospero. Seeming passed for being in morals, politics, and all affairs of life. I have already touched on this as a capital defect in Petrarch's character; but it was a weakness inherent not only in him and in the age he inaugurated, but one, moreover, that has influenced the whole history of the Italians for evil. Sounding phrases like the _barbaros expellere_ of Julius II., like the _va fuori d'Italia_ of Garibaldian hymns, from time to time have roused the nation to feverish enthusiasm, too soon succeeded by dejected apathy. When the inefficiency of Rienzi was proved, all that remained for Petrarch was to warn and scold.