Plain common-sense politicians in other countries do not understand this passion for Rome as a capital, and think it their duty to lecture the Italians on their flightiness. The latter do not themselves pretend that the shores of the Tiber are a suitable site for a capital: Rome is lonely, unhealthy, and in a bad strategical position; she has no particular facilities for trade: her people, with some fine qualities, are less orderly and industrious than the Tuscans or the Piedmontese. Nevertheless all Italy cries with one voice for Rome, firmly believing that national life can never thrill with a strong and steady pulsation till the ancient capital has become the nation's heart. They feel that it is owing to Rome--Rome pagan as well as Christian--that they once played so grand a part in the drama of European history, and that they have now been able to attain that fervid sentiment of unity which has brought them at last together under one government. Whether they are right, whether if right they are likely to be successful, need not be inquired here. But it deserves to be noted that this enthusiasm for a famous name--for it is nothing more--is substantially the same feeling as that which created and hallowed the Holy Empire of the Middle Ages. The events of the last few years on both sides of the Atlantic have proved that men are not now, any more than they ever were, chiefly governed by calculations of material profit and loss. Sentiments, fancies, theories, have not lost their power; the spirit of poetry has not wholly passed away from politics. And strange as seems to us the worship paid to the name of mediæval Rome by those who saw the sins and the misery of her people, it can hardly have been an intenser feeling than is the imaginative reverence wherewith the Italians of to-day look on the city whence, as from a fountain, all the streams of their national life have sprung, and in which, as in an ocean, they are all again to mingle. FOOTNOTES: [323] Hist. Eccl. l. ix. c. 6: τὸν δὲ φάναι, ὡς οὐχ ἑκὼν τάδε ἐπιχειρεῖ, ἀλλά τις συνεχῶς ἐνοχλῶν αὐτὸν βιάζεται, καὶ ἐπιτάττει τὴν Ῥώμην πορθεῖν. [324] See the two Lives of St. Adalbert in Pertz, _M. G. H._, iv., evidently compiled soon after his death. [325] Another letter of Petrarch's to John Colonna, written immediately after his arrival in the city, deserves to be quoted, it is so like what a stranger would now write off after his first day in Rome:--'In præsens nihil est quod inchoare ausim, miraculo rerum tantarum et stuporis mole obrutus ... præsentia vero, mirum dictu, nihil imminuit sed auxit omnia: vere maior fuit Roma maioresque sunt reliquiæ quam rebar: iam non orbem ab hac urbe domitum sed tam sero domitum miror. Vale.'