antecessor.  The more of a saint, the less of a gentleman.  Personally offensive, I assure you!  But the others were nearly as bad.  The haughty Paul, the fanatic Gregory, the worldly Urban, the austere Innocent the Tenth, the affable Alexander the Seventh, all concurred in assuring me that it was deeply to be regretted that I should ever have been emancipated from the restraints of the Stygian realm, to which I should do well to return with all possible celerity; that it would much conduce to the interests of the Church if my name could be forgotten; and that as for doing anything to revive its memory, they would just as soon think of canonising Judas Iscariot.”

“And therefore your Holiness has brought these rats upon us, enlisted, I nothing doubt, in the infernal regions?”

“Precisely so:  Plutonic, necyomantic, Lemurian rats, kindly lent by the Prince of Darkness for the occasion, and come dripping from Styx to squeak and gibber in the Capitol.  But I note your Holiness’s admission that they belong to a region exempt from your jurisdiction, and that, therefore, your measures against them, except as regards their status as belligerents, are for the most part illegitimate and ultra vires.”

“I would argue that point,” replied Alexander the Eighth, “if my lungs were as tough as when I pleaded before the Rota in Pope Urban’s time.  For the present I confine myself to formally protesting against your Holiness’s unprecedented and parricidal conduct in invading your country at the head of an army of loathsome vermin.”

“Unprecedented!” exclaimed Borgia.  “Am I not the modern Coriolanus?  Did Narses experience blacker ingratitude than I?  Where would the temporal power be but for me?  Who smote the Colonna?  Who squashed the Orsini?  Who gave the Popes to dwell quietly in their own house?  Monsters of unthankfulness!”

“I am sure,” said Alexander the Eighth soothingly, “that my predecessors’ inability to comply with your Holiness’s request must have cost them many inward tears, not the less genuine because entirely invisible and completely inaudible.  A wise Pope will, before all things, consider the spirit of his age.  The force of public opinion, which your Holiness lately appeared to disparage, was, in fact, as operative upon yourself as upon any of your successors.  If you achieved great things in your lifetime, it was because the world was with you.  Did you pursue the same methods now, you would soon discover that you had become an offensive anachronism.  It will not have escaped your Holiness’s penetration that what moralists will persist in terming the elevation of the standard of the Church, is the result of the so-called improvement of the world.”