as common as murderous hate; and no man’s life was safe save in so far as his own hand or his own walls could protect it.  And walls did not always avail.  I find a petition to Leo X. from a monastery in Rome, setting forth that a document assuring certain indulgences to the house had been lost at the time of the sack and plunder of the convent during the last conclave.  No sort of claim, it is to be observed, is attempted to be set up of redress for the plunder and destruction of the property of the convent; only a prayer that the privileges in question might be again granted in consideration of the loss of the document.  A very curious illustration of Roman manners in the sixteenth century is to be found in a practice with regard to these periods of interregnum which I find recorded by Cancellieri in his work on the conclaves.  Roman wives, it seems, were forbidden—­not without reason—­to leave their homes and go forth into the streets of Rome at their pleasure.  But in the articles of the marriage contract it was stipulated that the lady should be free to go out on certain specified occasions, mainly ecclesiastical festivals; and among these it was always specially provided that the lady might go out during the days of the exposition of the body of a deceased pope for the purpose of kissing his feet.  One would have thought that, looking to the state of things in the city, the time of the interregnum would have been the very last to select for ladies to venture into the streets.  It would seem, however, that the Roman matrons thought otherwise.  Cancellieri says that it was in those days a common saying among Roman ladies that “Happy were they who were married to Spaniards!” For it would seem that the Spanish husbands in Rome did not think it necessary to enforce this restraint on their wives—­a circumstance that rather curiously contradicts our general notions of Spanish marital feelings and discipline.

In truth, the condition of Rome during the period of the conclave down to very recent times affords a singular evidence of the virtue of the old French formula, “Le roi est mort!  Vive le roi!” as signifying the non-existence of any period of transition between one embodiment of law and authority and his successor; for the absence of any similar provision in the case of the popes made Rome a veritable hell upon earth during the period of a papal election.

But if the city outside the walls within which the purple fathers of the Church were deliberating presented a scene which was a disgrace and a scandal to Christendom, that which was being enacted within those walls was very often still more profoundly scandalous.  Never probably has any human institution existed in which practice was more grossly and notoriously in disaccord with pretensions and theory, and with respect to which the highest and most sacred of all conceivable human sanctions was so shamelessly desecrated and profaned to the lowest and vilest uses.