at Sinigaglia, relates that Vitellozzo Vitelli, while being strangled by Cesare Borgia’s assassin, begged hard that the father of his murderer, the horrible Alexander, might be entreated to pronounce his absolution.  The same Alexander was nearly suffocated in the Vatican by the French soldiers who crowded round to kiss his mantle, and who had made him tremble for his life a few days previously.  Cellini on his knees implored Pope Clement to absolve him from the guilt of homicide and theft, yet spoke of him as ‘transformed to a savage beast’ by a sudden access of fury.  At one time he trembled before the awful Majesty of Christ’s Vicar, revealed in Paul III.; at another he reviled him as a man ’who neither believed in God nor in any other article of religion.  A mysterious sanctity environed the person of the Pontiff.  When Gianpaolo Baglioni held Julius II. in his power in Perugia, he respected the Pope’s freedom, though he knew that Julius would overthrow his tyranny.  Machiavelli condemns this as cowardice, but it was wholly consistent with the sentiment of the age.  ’It cannot have been goodness or conscience which restrained him,’ writes the philosopher of Florence, ’for the heart of a man who cohabited with his sister, and had massacred his cousins and his nephews, could not have harbored any piety.  We must conclude that men know not how to be either guilty in a noble manner, or entirely good.  Although crime may have a certain grandeur of its own, or at least a mixture of more generous motives, they do not attain to this.  Gianpaolo, careless though he was about incest and parricide, could not, or dared not, on a just occasion, achieve an exploit for which the whole world would have admired his spirit, and by which he would have won immortal glory:  for he would have been the first to show how little prelates, living and ruling as they do, deserve to be esteemed, and would have done a deed superior in its greatness to all the infamy, to all the peril, that it might have brought with it.’[1] It is difficult to know which to admire most, the superstition of Gianpaolo, or the cynicism of the commentary, the spurious piety which made the tyrant miss his opportunity, or the false standard of moral sublimity by which the half-ironical critic measures his mistake.  In combination they produce a lively impression of the truth of what I have attempted to establish—­that in Italy at this period religion survived as superstition even among the most depraved, and that the crimes of the Church had produced a schism between this superstition and morality.

[1] Discorsi, i. 27.  This episode in Gianpaolo Baglioni’s life may be illustrated by the curious story told about Gabrino Fondulo, the tyrant of Cremona.  The Emperor Sigismund and Pope John XXIII. were his guests together in the year 1414.  Part of their entertainment consisted in visiting the sights of Cremona with their host, who took them up the great Tower (396 feet high) without any escort.  They