of all pontiffs. The appointment of the German Jew Giammaria as Castellan and Count of Verrucchio was even in Rome an unusual reward for skilled performance on the lute, and even for the third successor of Alexander VI it was venturesome to let the poet Querno, attired as Venus and supported by two Cupids, declaim verses to him at the Cosmalia in 1519. We have already mentioned the scandalous carnival of that year, and the theatre for which Raffaelle was forced to paint the scenery. A year later an unknown savant, under the mask of Pasquino, complained of the sad state of the sciences in Rome, of the exile of the Muses, and the starvation of professors and literary men.
From all this data the conclusion has been drawn that Leo X was by no means a Maecenas of the fine arts and sciences; that the high enthusiasm for them shown in his letters, as edited by Bembo and Sadoleto, betrays more of the thoughts of his clever secretary than his own ideas; and that his literary dilettantism was lacking in all artistic perception, and all delicate cultivation of taste. Leo has been thought to owe his undeserved fame to the circumstance that he was the son of Lorenzo, and that his accession seemed at the time destined to put an end to the sad confusions and wars of the last decades. Moreover, throughout the long pontificate of Clement VII, and equally under the pressure of the ecclesiastical reaction in the time of Paul IV, no allusion was allowed to the wrongdoing of this Leonine period; till at last the real circumstances were so far forgotten, that the fine flower of art and literature in the first twenty years of the sixteenth century was attributed to the Medicean Pope.
But there are points to be noted on the other side. Even if we discount much of the praise which Poliziano lavishes on his pupil in deference to his father, we cannot question the conspicuous talent of Giovanni de' Medici, the exceptionally careful literary education which he had enjoyed, and his liberal and wise conduct during his cardinalship. We must also esteem it to his credit that as Pope he continued to be the friend of Raffaelle, and that in Rome and Italy at least he did not oppress freedom of conscience, nor sacrifice the free and noble character of the best of the Renaissance. Nor can it be overlooked that his pontificate made an excellent beginning, though certainly the decline soon set in; the Pontiff's good qualities became less apparent, his faults more conspicuous, and events proved that, as in so many other instances, the man's intrinsic merit was not great enough to bear his exaltation to the highest dignity of Christendom without injury to his personality.
Such a change in outward position, promotion to an absolute sway not inherited, intercourse with a host of flatterers and servants who idolised him (there were 2000 dependents at Leo's Court)—all this is almost certain to be fatal to the character of the man to whose lot it falls. Seldom does the possessor of the highest dignity find this enormous burden a source and means of spiritual illumination and
