vigilantly at whatever might threaten the interests of the one or of the other. But, beyond this, what cared he? Nought. Let him but reign, and, while reigning, advance the temporal authority of his See; let him but retain and increase his power of patronizing science, of cultivating philosophy and art, of indulging his private tastes; and what cared he whether his spiritual dominions were kept in quiet acquiescence and subordination, or whether they were convulsed with throes and agonies?

"S. Georgio, we will have no consistory to-morrow," again rejoined the Pontiff. "We must look to our poor wounded birds; then we must see our kennel, for I fear me some of the dogs are sadly wounded by that villanous Acteon; then we must have some hours' practice on the flute before our master comes to us, and then; and then. . . . but I am deadly tired, Georgio; do not bore me!"

"Nero played his flute whilst Rome was burning." "Did you dare to say that? Did you dare thus to add to thine other crimes this one of insult to God's Anointed? Cardinal S. Georgio, did you dare to do so?" suddenly exclaimed the Pontiff.

"Nero played his flute whilst Rome was burning," the voice re-echoed.

Then burst forth Pope Leo's shrill, loud voice to all the prickers and huntsmen, commanding them to scour the adjoining forests, and to seize the blaspheming speaker.

"Suffer your poor servant to address your Holi

ness," spoke the Cardinal, and in a tone so touchingly sorrowful that Pope Leo's wrath was soothed instantly. "Rome is burning, may it please you, though your Holiness, devoted as you are to high art and learning, knows it not. I have despised, as much as may be, the frantic nonsense of this low German monk-Luther, he is called-but, believe me, your Holiness, he hath flung a torch into our sacred homestead. Your Holiness can little tell what a flame is now rampant and devouring."

"Talk to us of that after dinner, good S. Georgio," returned Pope Leo; "we are too wearied with this day's chase: talk to us about it then."

"Nero played his flute while Rome was burning," again, and for the third time, broke upon the ears of and procrastinating Pontiff.

the easy

"Georgio! didst thou hear that-that infernal voice ?" said Leo, in the deepest agitation. "Have I deserved it?" he continued, with great feeling. "Have I ever neglected the best interests of our subjects? Have I ever shown indifference to their sorrows? Am I a Nero ?"

The Pope and the Cardinal had, during this painful conversation, been riding onward, and they had drawn near to the Lateran.

S. Georgio was silent. The Pontiff became seriously alarmed.

"Answer me, S. Georgio!" he said in a voice of command, as every step of his horse brought him nearer to his home, and he began to fear lest he should

lose the occasion of such confidence with his adviser. "Answer me, S. Georgio!"

"But defer all the other engagements of your Holiness, and command me to summon a consistory, and then your Holiness will know that I am no fool in awaking fears," returned the Cardinal, with grim meaning.

"Then call a council," said the Pontiff; "we give thee full powers for convening and arranging it.”

It was under these, and many similar circumstances, that Pope Leo X. was induced to meet his cardinals and bishops, upon that question which Eckius had, by his pertinacity and zeal, forced upon the Roman conclave.

It would be absurd to say, that the Pontiff had kept himself in ignorance of the state of affairs in Germany. Whilst monks, and priests, and bishops, and even cardinals, were in fury at the inactivity of his Holinesswhilst they were, all of them, indulging in irreverent lampoons upon him, because of his absorption in matters ultra-ecclesiastical (meanwhile, caring but little for proceedings that were anti-ecclesiastical)—during all this, Pope Leo was neither ignorant of Martin Luther's movements, nor of their critical nature in regard to his Pontificate and Church.

But he was, in the real sense of the word, a latitudinarian. Therefore he felt, within his own heart, no theological impulse to destroy his foe. And so, looking at the conditions of antagonism with the bold Reformer from a purely secular point of view, he

wished to silence him by arts exclusively political. His own native inclination to kindliness kept him from wishing for a moment to use any agencies that might be cruel.

So it was, that when he entered the consistory, his Holiness was feeling neither merely the annoyance of one who was being kept from his favourite pastimes, nor that of one who was forced to attend to topics of a theology which he held in uttermost disgust; but rather, that of one who held himself to be an earthly sovereign, with whom policies and diplomacies were the best weapons of defence.

The prayers of the Church were offered: an impartial observer might have detected in the High Priest, and most assuredly in that grade of ecclesiastics which was next to him, a formality of worship that failed to have even the low virtue of formality. It would have been deeply affecting to such an observer, that while the Litanies were being chanted, there were, indeed, the prescribed prostrations and genuflections; there were, indeed, correct responses, without one note of voice breaking through the harmony of the supplicating murmur; but his eye would have been able to discern no one muscle convulsed by penitence upon the face of the worshippers: it might, however, have caught a sight of sundry ill-concealed smiles; it might have understood varied signs and movements among those devotees, as symptoms of impatience at the ceremonial.

Count Arensberg was not present. It was impossible that he should have been; for the conclave was

purely ecclesiastical. But supposing that he had been, what would not have been the result?

Would he not have recalled the poor church at Wittemberg, whither his mother had led him by her entreaties, and where, notwithstanding his high aristocratic prejudice, he had been touched by the plaintive cry of the penitent, by the earnest adoration of the sincere Christian man, and by the honest, large-minded, harsh, yet truthful lessons of Martin Luther, of which that little provincial cathedral was a witness?

The prayers that preceded the consistory! Why, the Pope himself would have preferred offering an oblation to Apollo. The Cardinals, most of them (so history tells us), loved Paganism, if they had vitality within them to love anything at all.*

We may gather somewhat of the spirit in which many of this consistory assembled, from words which were uttered among several groups of its members, before the entrance of the Pontiff enforced silence.

"Tear a wing off from this vile insect, and you will soon see he'll die," said a lordly abbot, half choking with his rage, and, also, with his effort at speaking.

"Holy Church must be healthy in even her remotest limbs, if she would so use her energy as to secure vast and useful conquests for the future," said a severe-looking bishop.

"Mix up a little poison with the honey of the Catholic faith-that is, suffer even a small error to be

*Note 9.