their nomination was, that they were regarded as the most zealous in the causes of the poor, and the most capable of discovering the means of ameliorating the moral and physical condition of the most numerous class.
When the chiefs of the clergy had obtained the sovereignty of Rome, and made it the capital of the Christian world; when they had centralized the power of the priesthood in the hands of the pope, the motive which determined the election of the pontiffs was, principally, that the candidate to whom the sacred college accorded the preference, should be he who possessed in the highest degree the capacity necessary to crush the aristocracy of birth under the weight of the aristocracy of talent.
But the motives which determined the election of Leo X. were different, and even opposed to those which had influenced the preceding electors, whose intentions had been more or less Christian; the cardinals, on this occasion, acted conformably to the plan of conduct which they had adopted, and which I have exposed above; they proposed solely as their object to preserve to the clergy their riches, and to increase their worldly enjoyments.
Leo X. was of the mould of which kings are made, and consequently he was not a fit person for a pope. In fact, his whole conduct has proved that he valued more his rights of birth than those which he derived from the papacy. He organized the court-service upon the footing of a court having a lay chief. His sister had at Rome the house and train of a princess, not in virtue of her relationship with the pope, but in her quality of daughter of the most influential lay prince of Italy.
Leo X. protected poets, painters, architects, sculptors, and men of science; he protected all the learned Greeks, who took refuge at that epoch in Italy; but it was as a temporal prince that he protected them, and solely to procure for himself enjoyment, and give a worldly lustre to his reign. A true pope would have profited by the lofty flight which the minds of Europe took at this epoch in every important direction, to
