“Of a certainty, my kinsman has no belief in your power, else he would have crushed you long ere this.  Nay, it was but three days ago that he said, gravely, he would rather you addressed the populace than the best priest in Christendom; for that other orators inflamed the crowd, and no man so stilled and dispersed them as you did.”

“And I called him profound!  Does not Heaven hush the air most when most it prepares the storm?  Ay, my Lord, I understand.  Stephen Colonna despises me.  I have been”—­(here, as he continued, a deep blush mantled over his cheek)—­“you remember it—­at his palace in my younger days, and pleased him with witty tales and light apophthegms.  Nay—­ha! ha!—­he would call me, I think, sometimes, in gay compliment, his jester—­his buffoon!  I have brooked his insult; I have even bowed to his applause.  I would undergo the same penance, stoop to the same shame, for the same motive, and in the same cause.  What did I desire to effect?  Can you tell me?  No!  I will whisper it, then, to you:  it was—­the contempt of Stephen Colonna.  Under that contempt I was protected, till protection became no longer necessary.  I desired not to be thought formidable by the patricians, in order that, quietly and unsuspected, I might make my way amongst the people.  I have done so; I now throw aside the mask.  Face to face with Stephen Colonna, I could tell him, this very hour, that I brave his anger; that I laugh at his dungeons and armed men.  But if he think me the same Rienzi as of old, let him; I can wait my hour.”

“Yet,” said Adrian, waiving an answer to the haughty language of his companion, “tell me, what dost thou ask for the people, in order to avoid an appeal to their passions?—­ignorant and capricious as they are, thou canst not appeal to their reason.”

“I ask full justice and safety for all men.  I will be contented with no less a compromise.  I ask the nobles to dismantle their fortresses; to disband their armed retainers; to acknowledge no impunity for crime in high lineage; to claim no protection save in the courts of the common law.”

“Vain desire!” said Adrian.  “Ask what may yet be granted.”

“Ha—­ha!” replied Rienzi, laughing bitterly, “did I not tell you it was a vain dream to ask for law and justice at the hands of the great?  Can you blame me, then, that I ask it elsewhere?” Then, suddenly changing his tone and manner, he added with great solemnity—­“Waking life hath false and vain dreams; but sleep is sometimes a mighty prophet.  By sleep it is that Heaven mysteriously communes with its creatures, and guides and sustains its earthly agents in the path to which its providence leads them on.”