moral advancement. Mediocre natures soon develop an immovable obstinacy, the despair of any reasonable adviser, and which is none the more tolerable for having received the varnish of a piety that worships itself. Talented natures too easily fall victims to megalomania, and by extravagant and ill-considered projects and undertakings drag their age with them into an abyss of ruin. Weak and sensual natures give themselves up to enjoyment, and consider the highest power merely as a licence to make merry. Leo was not a coarse voluptuary like Alexander VI, but he certainly was an intellectual Epicurean such as has seldom been known. Extremes should be avoided in forming a judgment of the pontificate and character of this prince. Not the objective historian, but the flattering politician, spoke in Erasmus when he lauded the three great benefits which Leo had conferred on humanity: the restoration of peace, of the sciences, and of the fear of God. It was a groundless suspicion that overshot the mark, when Martin Luther accused Leo of disbelief in the immortality of the soul; and John Bale (1574) spread abroad the supposed remark of the Pope to Bembo: "All ages can testifye enough, how profitable that fable of Christ has been to us and our compagnie." Hundreds of writers have copied this from Bale without verification. Much of Leo's character can be explained by the fact that he was a true son of the South, the personification of the soft Florentine temperament. This accounts for his childish joy in the highest honour of Christendom, "Questo mi da piacere, che la mia tiara!" The words of the office which he was reading, when five days before his death news was brought to him of the taking of Milan by his troops, may well serve as motto for this reign, lacking not sunshine and glory, but all serious success and all power: "Ut sine timore de manu inimicorum nostrorum liberati serviamus illi." This pontificate truly was, as Gregorovius has described it, a revelry of culture, which Ariosto accompanied with a poetic obbligato in his many-coloured Orlando. This poem was in truth "the image of Italy revelling in sensual and intellectual luxury, the ravishing, seductive, musical, and picturesque creation of decadence, just as Dante's poem had been the mirror of the manly power of the nation."
On December 27, 1521, a Conclave assembled, which closed on January 9, 1522, by the election of the Bishop of Tortosa as Adrian VI. He was born at Utrecht in 1459 and when a professor in Louvain was chosen by the Emperor Maximilian to be tutor to his grandson Charles. Afterwards he was sent as ambassador to Ferdinand the Catholic, who bestowed on him the Bishopric of Tortosa; Leo X made him Cardinal in 1517. This Conclave, attended by thirty-nine cardinals, offered a spectacle of the most disgraceful party struggles, but mustered enough unanimity to propose to the possible candidates a capitulation, by the terms of which the towns of the Papal States were divided amongst the
