on him that it made on Luther.  When his courtiers pointed to the Laocoon as the most illustrious monument of ancient sculpture, he turned away with horror, murmuring:  ‘Idols of the Pagans!’ The Belvedere, which was fast becoming the first statue-gallery in Europe, he walled up and never entered.  At the same time he set himself with earnest purpose, so far as his tied hands and limited ability would go, to reform the more patent abuses of the Church.  Leo had raised about three million ducats by the sale of offices, which represented an income of 348,000 ducats to the purchasers, and provided places for 2,550 persons.  By a stroke of his pen Adrian canceled these contracts and threw upon the world a crowd of angry and defrauded officials.  It was but poor justice to remind them that their bargain with his predecessor had been illegal.  Such attempts, however, at a reformation of ecclesiastical society were as ineffectual as pin-pricks in the cure of a fever which demands blood-letting.  The real corruption of Rome, deeply seated in high places, remained untouched.  Luther meanwhile had carried all before him in the North, and accurate observers in Rome itself dreaded some awful catastrophe for the guilty city.  ’This state is set upon the razor-edge of peril; God grant we have not soon to take flight to Avignon or to the ends of the ocean.  I see the downfall of this spiritual monarchy at hand.  Unless God help, it is all over with us.’[3] Adrian met the emergency, and took up arms against the sea of troubles by expressing his horror of simony, sensuality, thievery and so forth.  The result was that he was simply laughed at.  Pasquin made so merry with his name that Adrian vowed he would throw the statue into the Tiber; whereupon the Duke of Sessa wittily replied:  ’Throw him to the bottom, and, like a frog, he’ll go on croaking.’  Berni, again, wrote one of his cleverest Capitoli upon the dunce who could not comprehend his age; and when he died, his doctor’s door was ornamented with this inscription:  Liberatori patriae Senatus Populusque Romanus.

    [1] See Greg. Stadt Rom, vol. viii. pp. 382, 383.  The details
    about Adriano are chiefly taken from the Relazioni of the
    Venetian embassadors, series ii. vol. iii. pp. 75-120.

[2] His father’s name was Florus or Flerentius, of the Flemish family, it is supposed, of Dedel.  Berni calls him a carpet-maker.  Other accounts represent him as a ship’s carpenter.  The Pope’s baptismal name was Adrian.

    [3] See the passage quoted from the Lettere de Principi,
    Rome, March 17, 1523, by Burckhardt, p. 99, note.

Great was the rejoicing when another Medici was made Pope in 1523.  People hoped that the merry days of Leo would return.  But things had gone too far toward dissolution.  Clement VII. failed to give satisfaction to the courtiers whom his more genial cousin had delighted:  even the scholars and the poets grumbled.[1] His rule was weak and vacillating, so that the Colonna faction raised its head again and drove him to the Castle of S. Angelo.  The political horizon of Italy grew darker and more sullen daily, as before some dreadful storm.  Over Rome itself impended ruin—­