words are often used, but in sober truth, for his parents, his
children, his lands, his house, his altars. It was something
that he marched forth to battle beneath the Carroccio, which had
been the object of his childish veneration: that his aged father
looked down from the battlements on his exploits; that his
friends and his rivals were the witnesses of his glory. If he
fell, he was consigned to no venal or heedless guardians. The
same day saw him conveyed within the walls which he had defended.
His wounds were dressed by his mother; his confession was
whispered to the friendly priest who had heard and absolved the
follies of his youth; his last sigh was breathed upon the lips of
the lady of his love. Surely there is no sword like that which
is beaten out of a ploughshare. Surely this state of things was
not unmixedly bad; its evils were alleviated by enthusiasm and by
tenderness; and it will at least be acknowledged that it was well
fitted to nurse poetical genius in an imaginative and observant
mind.

Nor did the religious spirit of the age tend less to this result
than its political circumstances. Fanaticism is an evil, but it
is not the greatest of evils. It is good that a people should be
roused by any means from a state of utter torpor;--that their
minds should be diverted from objects merely sensual, to
meditations, however erroneous, on the mysteries of the
moral and intellectual world; and from interests which are
immediately selfish to those which relate to the past, the
future, and the remote. These effects have sometimes been
produced by the worst superstitions that ever existed; but the
Catholic religion, even in the time of its utmost extravagance
and atrocity, never wholly lost the spirit of the Great Teacher,