“Ut canerent data multa olim sunt vatibus aera: 
  Ut taceam, quantum tu mihi, Paule, dabis?”

In his life of Adrian VI., the successor of Leo X., Paulus Jovius, not indeed the most trustworthy of authorities, tells a story which, if not true, might well be so.  He says, that the Pope, being vexed at the free speech of Pasquin, proposed to have him thrown into the Tiber, thinking thus to stop his tongue; but the Spanish legate dissuaded him, by suggesting, with grave Spanish wisdom, that all the frogs of the river, becoming infected with his spirit, would adopt his style of speech and croak only pasquinades.  The contemptibleness of the assailant made him the more dreaded.  Did not the very reeds tell the fatal secret about King Midas?

Pasquin was by no means the only figure in Rome who gave expression to thoughts and feelings which it would have been dangerous to the living subjects of the ecclesiastical rule to utter aloud.  His most distinguished companion was Marforio, a colossal statue of an ocean or river god, which was discovered in the sixteenth century near the forum of Mars, from which he derived his name.  Toward the end of the same century, he was placed in the lower court of the Palazzo de’ Conservatori, on the Capitol, and here he has since remained.  Dialogues were often carried on between him and his friend Pasquin, and a share in their conversation was sometimes taken by the Facchino, or so called Porter of the Palazzo Piombino.  In his “Roma Nova,” published in 1660, Sprenger says that Pasquin was assigned to the nobles, Marforio to the citizens, and the Facchino to the common people.  But besides these there were the Abate Luigi of the Palazzo Valle,—­Madama Lucrezia, who still sits behind the Venetian palace near the Church of St. Mark,—­the Baboon, from which the Via Babbuino takes its name,—­and the marble portrait of Scanderbeg, the great enemy of the Turks, on the facade of the house which he at one time occupied in Rome.  Each of these personages now and then issued an epigram or took part in the satirical talk of his companions.  Such a number of cold and secure censors is not surprising in a city like Rome, where the checks upon open speech are so many, and where priests and spies exercise so close a scrutiny over the thoughts and words of men.  Oppression begets hypocrisy, and a tyrant adds to the faults of his subjects the vices of cowardice and secrecy.  Caustic Forsyth, speaking of the Romans, begins with the bitter remark, that “the national character is the most ruined thing at Rome”; and in the same section he adds, “Their humor is naturally caustic; but they lampoon, as they stab, only in the dark.  The danger attending open attacks forces them to confine their satire within epigram; and thus pasquinade is but the offspring of hypocrisy, the only resource of wits who are obliged to be grave on so many absurdities in religion, and respectful to so many upstarts in purple.”  Thus if