write better than Vernon—­true; and therefore his case is more desperate.  Besides, Vernon was rich:  Wilkes is undone; and, though he has had great support, his patrons will be sick of maintaining him.  He must either sink to poverty and a jail, or commit new excesses, for which he will get knocked on the head.  The Scotch are his implacable enemies to a man.  A Rienzi[2] cannot stop:  their histories are summed up in two words—­a triumph and an assassination.

[Footnote 1:  In 1739 our Government had declared war against Spain.  “There was at the time among the members of the Opposition in the House of Commons a naval captain named Vernon, a man of bold, blustering tongue, and presumed therefore by many to be of a corresponding readiness of action.  In some of the debates he took occasion to inveigh against the timidity of our officers, who had hitherto, as he phrased it, spared Porto Bello; and he affirmed that he could take it himself with a squadron of six ships.  The Ministry caught at the prospect of delivering themselves from his harangues, and gave him half as many ships again as he desired, with the temporary rank of Vice-admiral; and on July, 1739, he sailed for the American coast.  When he reached it he found that the news of the rupture of the peace had not yet reached the governor of the city, and that it was in no condition to resist an attack.  Many of the guns were dismounted; and for those that were serviceable there was not sufficient ammunition.  A fire of musketry alone sufficed to win the fort that protected the entrance to the harbour, and an equally brief cannonade drove the garrison from the castle.  The governor had no further means of defence; and thus in forty-eight hours after his arrival Vernon had accomplished his boast, and was master of the place.”  In a clever paper in the “Cambridge Museum Philologicum” Bishop Thirlwall compared the man and his exploit to Cleon and his achievement at Sphacteria in the Peloponnesian War. (See the Editor’s “History of the British Navy,” c. 9.)]

[Footnote 2:  “Rienzi.”

    Then turn we to her latest tribune’s name,
    From her ten thousand tyrants turn to thee,
    Redeemer of dark centuries of shame,
    The friend of Petrarch, hope of Italy,
    Rienzi; last of Romans.

("Childe Harold,” iv. 114.)

His story is told with almost more than his usual power by Gibbon (c. 70).  Born in the lowest class, “he could inherit neither dignity nor fortune; and the gift of a liberal education, which they painfully bestowed, was the cause of his glory and his untimely end.”  He, while still little more than a youth, had established such a reputation for eloquence, that he was one of the deputies sent by the Commons to Avignon to plead with the Pope (Clement VI.).  The state of Rome, aggravated by the absence of the Pope, was miserable in the extreme.  The citizens “were equally oppressed by the arrogance of the nobles and the corruption of the magistrates.”