This first Pope of the house of Medici enjoyed at Rome the fame of his father Lorenzo the Magnificent at Florence.  Extolled as an Augustus in his lifetime, he has given his name to what is called the golden age of Italian culture.  As a man, he was well qualified to represent the neo-pagan freedom of the Renaissance.  Saturated with the spirit of his period, he had no sympathy with religious earnestness, no conception of moral elevation, no aim beyond a superficial polish of the understanding and the taste.  Good Latinity seemed to him of more importance than true doctrine:  Jupiter sounded better in a sermon than Jehovah; the immortality of the soul was an open topic for debate.  At the same time he was extravagantly munificent to men of culture, and hearty in his zeal for the diffusion of liberal knowledge.  But what was reasonable in the man was ridiculous in the pontiff.  There remained an irreconcilable incongruity between his profession of the Primacy of Christianity and his easy epicurean philosophy.

Leo, like all the Medici after the first Cosimo, was a bad financier.  His reckless expenditure contributed in no small measure to the corruption of Rome and to the ruin of the Latin Church, while it won the praises of the literary world.  Julius, who had exercised rigid economy, left 700,000 ducats in the coffers of S. Angelo.  The very jewels of Leo’s tiara were pledged to pay his debts, when he died suddenly in 1521.  During the heyday of his splendor he spent 8,000 ducats monthly on presents to his favorites and on his play-debts.  His table, which was open to all the poets, singers, scholars, and buffoons of Rome, cost half the revenues of Romagna and the March.  He founded the knightly Order of S. Peter to replenish his treasury, and turned the conspiracy of the Cardinal Petrucci against his life to such good account—­extorting from the Cardinal Riario a fine of 5,000 ducats, and from the Cardinals Soderini and Hadrian the sum of 125,000—­that Von Hutten was almost justified in treating the whole of that dark business as a mere financial speculation.  The creation of thirty-nine Cardinals in 1517 brought him in above 500,000 ducats.  Yet, in spite of these expedients for getting gold, the bankers of Rome were half ruined when he died.  The Bini had lent him 200,000 ducats; the Gaddi, 32,000; the Ricasoli, 10,000; the Cardinal Salviati claimed a debt of 80,000; the Cardinals Santi Quattro and Armellini, each 150,000.[1] These figures are only interesting when we remember that the mountains of gold which they denote were squandered in aesthetic sensuality.

When the Pope was made, he said to Giuliano (Duke of Nemours):  ’Let us enjoy the Papacy since God has given it us—­godiamoci il Papato, poiche Dio ce l’ ha dato.[2]’ It was in this spirit that Leo administered the Holy See.  The keynote which he struck dominated the whole society of Rome.  At Agostine Chigi’s banquets, prelates of the Church and Apostolic secretaries sat