Leti, in his entertaining and gossipping life of this most merciless of Popes, tells a story of another pasquinade, which exhibits the temper of Sixtus.  One morning Pasquin appeared clothed in a very dirty shirt, and, upon being asked by Marforio, why he wore such foul linen, replied, he could get no other, for the Pope had made his washerwoman a princess,—­meaning thereby the Pope’s sister, Donna Camilla, who had formerly been a laundress, but was now established with a fortune and a palace.  “This stinging piece of raillery was carried directly to his Holiness, who ordered a strict search to be made for the author, but to no purpose.  Upon which he stuck up printed papers in all the public places of the city, promising, upon the word of a Pope, to give the author of the pasquinade a thousand pistoles and his life, provided he would discover himself, but threatened to hang him, if he was found out by any one else, and offered the thousand pistoles to the informer.”  Upon this the author was simple enough to make confession and to demand the money.  Sixtus paid him the sum, and then, saying that he had indeed promised him his life, but not freedom from punishment, ordered his hands to be cut off, and his tongue to be bored, “to prevent him from being so witty for the future.”  This act, says Leti, “filled every one with terror and amazement.”  And well might such a piece of Oriental barbarity excite the horror of the Romans.[11] Pasquin, however, was not alarmed, and a few days afterward he appeared holding a wet shirt to dry in the sun.  It was a Sunday morning, and Marforio, naturally surprised at such a violation of the day, asked him why he could not wait till Monday before drying it Pasquin answered, that there was no time to lose; for, if he waited till to-morrow to dry his shirt, he might have to pay for the sunshine;—­hinting at the heavy taxes which Sixtus had laid upon the necessaries of life, and from which the sunshine itself might not long be exempt.

It was near about this time that a caricature was circulated in Rome, representing Sixtus as King Stork and the Romans as frogs vainly attempting to escape from his devouring beak. Merito haec patimur, “We suffer deservedly,” was the legend of the picture, and the moral it conveyed was a true one.  Rome was in such a state as to require the harshest applications, and the despotic severity of Sixtus did much to restore decency and security to life.  He left the Romans in a far better condition than he found them; and it would have been well for Rome, if among his successors there had been more to follow his example in repressing vice and violence,—­in a word, had there been more King Storks and fewer King Logs.

The most poetic of pasquinades, and one in which wit rises into imagination, belongs to the pontificate of Urban viii. (1623-1644.) This Pope issued a bull excommunicating all persons who took snuff in the churches of Seville; whereupon Pasquin quoted the following verse from Job (xiii. 25):—­“Contra folium quod vento rapitur ostendis potentiam tuam? et stipulam siccam persequeris?”