But here and there he made the acquaintance of a priest or a monk whose learned conversation harmonized with his thoughts and helped the grave illusion in which--perhaps out of sheer idleness--he loved to think himself back in the abbey in England. And so he led a life unlike the lives around him, and many of the people in the quarter learned to know him by sight, and called him and his men 'the English'; and as most of the people of Rome were very much occupied with their own affairs, chiefly evil, Gilbert was allowed to live as he pleased. But for the fact that even his well-filled purse must in the course of time be exhausted, he might have spent the remainder of his life in the Lion Inn, by the bridge, carelessly meditative and simply happy. But other forces were at work to guide his life into other channels, and he had reckoned ill when he had fancied, being himself unmoved, that the love of such a woman as Queen Eleanor was a mere incident without consequence, forgotten like a flower of last year's blossoming. Several times during the winter and in the spring that followed, the friar Arnold came to see him in his lodgings and talked of the great things that were coming, of the redemption of man from man by the tearing down of all sovereign power, whether of pope or emperor, or king or prince, to make way for the millennium of a universal republic. Then the fanatic's burning eyes flashed like beacons, his long arms made sudden and wild gestures, his soft brown hair stood from his head as though lifted by a passing breeze, and his whole being was transfigured in the flash of his own eloquence. When he spoke to the Romans with that voice and with that look, they rose quickly to a tumult, as the sea under a gale, and he could guide them in their storming to ends of destruction and terror. But there was no drop of southern blood in Gilbert's veins nor anything to which the passionate Italian's eloquence appealed. Instead of catching fire, he argued; instead of joining Arnold in his attempt to turn the world into a republic, he was more and more persuaded of the excellence of all he had left behind him in the north. He incarnated that aristocratic temper which has in all times, since Duke William crossed the water, leavened the strong mass of the Anglo-Saxon character, balancing its rude democratic strength with the keenness of a higher physical organization and the nobility of a more disinterested daring, and again and again rousing the English-speaking races to life and conquest, when they were sunk deep in the sordid interests of trade and money-making. So when Arnold talked of laws and institutions which should again make Rome the mistress of the world, Gilbert answered him by talking of men who had the strength to take the world and to be its masters and make it obey whatsoever laws they saw fit to impose. Between the two there was the everlasting difference between theory and action; and though it