CHAPTER IX.
MAFFEO BARBERINI AS URBAN VIII.
Scarcely any Pope has left to posterity so accurate a delineation of his character and aims in his own trenchant utterances as Urban VIII. When shown the marble monuments of his predecessors, he proudly observed that he "would erect iron ones to himself." And the fortress of Castelfranco on the Bolognese frontier (called, in honour of his Holiness, Fort Urbino), the new breastworks of the Castle of St. Angelo, the Vatican Library turned into an arsenal, the new manufactory of arms at Tivoli, and finally the costly harbour of Civita Vecchia, are so many silent testimonies to the cherished desire of this pontiff to transform the eternal city into an inviolable symbol in stone of the temporal power of the Pope, and to accredit himself as a true mediæval vicegerent of Christ with the two-edged sword of the world. His athletic physique and iron energy were ever the vigorous executors of his ideas. In his self-sufficiency he disdained to take counsel with the Sacred College, saying that he "knew better than all the cardinals put together," and boldly set himself above all ancient constitutions, alleging the unheard of reason that "the sentence of a living Pope was worth more than all the decrees of a hundred dead ones." And finally, to leave his flock, the Christian peoples, in no manner of doubt about his pastoral humility, he revoked the resolve of the Romans never again
