But as was said before, we should err radically if we regard Rienzi altogether in the light of Romance. Undoubtedly as such--as a fiction, and coming under the title of a novel, it is a glorious, a wonderful conception, and not the less wonderfully and gloriously carried out. What else could we say of a book over which the mind so delightedly lingers in perusal? In its delineations of passion and character--in the fine blending and contrasting of its incidents--in the rich and brilliant tints of its feudal paintings--in a pervading air of chivalry, and grace, and sentiment--in all that can throw a charm over the pages of Romance, the last novel of Bulwer is equal, if not superior, to any of his former productions. Still we should look at the work in a different point of view. It is History. We hesitate not to say that it is History in its truest--in its only true, proper, and philosophical garb. Sismondi's works--were not. There is no greater error than dignifying with the name of History a tissue of dates and details, though the dates be ordinarily correct, and the details indisputably true. Not even with the aid of acute comment will such a tissue satisfy our individual notions of History. To the effect let us look--to the impression rather than to the seal. And how very seldom is any definite impression left upon the mind of the historical reader! How few bear away--even from the pages of Gibbon--Rome and the Romans. Vastly different was the genius of Niebuhr--than whom no man possessed a more discriminative understanding of the uses and the purposes of the pen of the historiographer. But we digress. Bearing in mind that "to contemplate"--_ιςορειν_[1]--should and must be allowed a more noble and a more expansive acceptation than has been usually given it, we shall often discover in Fiction the essential spirit and vitality of Historic Truth--while Truth itself, in many a dull and lumbering Archive, shall be found guilty of all the inefficiency of Fiction. [Footnote 1: History, from _ιςορειν_, to contemplate, seems, among the Greeks, to have embraced not only the knowledge of past events, but also Mythology, Esopian, and Milesian fables, _Romance_, Tragedy and Comedy. But our business is with things, not words.] Rienzi, then, is History. But there are other aspects in which it may be regarded with advantage. Let us survey it as a profound and lucid exposition of the _morale_ of Government--of the Philosophies of Rule and Misrule--of the absolute incompatibility of Freedom and Ignorance--Tyranny in the few and Virtue in the many. Let us consider it as something akin to direct evidence that a people is not a mob, nor a mob a people, nor a mob's idol the idol of a people--that in a nation's self is the only security for a nation--and that it is absolutely necessary to model upon the _character_ of the governed, the machinery, whether simple or complex, of the governmental legislation.