Gaudeat orator, Musae gaudete Latinae;
    Sustulit e medio quod Deus ipse Pium. 
  Ut bene consuluit doctis Deus omnibus aeque,
    Quos Pius in cunctos se tulit usque gravem. 
  Nunc sperare licet.  Nobis Deus optime Quintum
    Reddito Nicoleon Eugeniumve patrem.

and again:—­

  Hac sibi quam vivus construxit clauditur arca
    Corpore; nam Stygios mens habet atra lacus.

Pius himself was not unconscious of the discrepancy between his old and his new self. AEneam rejicite, Pium recipite, he exclaims in a celebrated passage of his Retractation, where he declares his heartfelt sorrow for the irrevocable words of light and vain romance that he had scattered in his careless youth.  Yet though Pius II. proved a virtual failure by lacking the strength to lead his age either backwards to the ideal of earlier Christianity or forwards on the path of modern culture, he is the last Pope of the Renaissance period whom we can regard with real respect.  Those who follow, and with whose personal characters, rather than their action as Pontiffs, we shall now be principally occupied, sacrificed the interests of Christendom to family ambition, secured their sovereignty at the price of discord in Italy, transacted with the infidel, and played the part of Antichrist upon the theater of Europe.

    [1] Rosmini, Vita di Filelfo, vol. ii. p. 321.

It would be possible to write the history of these priest-kings without dwelling more than lightly on scandalous circumstances, to merge the court-chronicle of the Vatican in a recital of European politics, or to hide the true features of high Papal dignitaries beneath the masks constructed for them by ecclesiastical apologists.  That cannot, however, be the line adopted by a writer treating of civilization in Italy during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.  He must paint the Popes of the Renaissance as they appeared in the midst of society, when Lorenzo de’ Medici called Rome ‘a sink of all the vices,’ and observers so competent as Machiavelli and Guicciardini ascribed the moral depravity and political decay of Italy to their influence.  It might be objected that there is now no need to portray the profligacy of that court, which, by arousing the conscience of Northern Europe to a sense of intolerable shame, proved one of the main causes of the Reformation.  But without reviewing those old scandals, a true understanding of Italian morality, and a true insight into Italian social feeling as expressed in literature, are alike impossible.  Nor will the historian of this epoch shrink from his task, even though the transactions he has to record seem to savor of legend rather than of simple fact.  No fiction contains matter more fantastic, no myth or allegory is more adapted to express a truth in figures of the fancy, than the authentic well-attested annals of this period of seventy years, from 1464 to 1534.