, was certainly
familiar with three. The Cardinal, however, wrote not only with ease, but
with remarkable elegance, vigor and vivacity, in whatever language he
chose to adopt. The style of his letters and other documents, regarded
simply as compositions, was inferior to that of no writer of the age. His
occasional orations, too, were esteemed models of smooth and flowing
rhetoric, at an epoch when the art of eloquence was not much cultivated.
Yet it must be allowed that beneath all the shallow but harmonious flow
of his periods, it would be idle to search for a grain of golden sand.
Not a single sterling, manly thought is to be found in all his
productions. If at times our admiration is excited with the appearance of
a gem of true philosophy, we are soon obliged to acknowledge, on closer
inspection, that we have been deceived by a false glitter. In retirement,
his solitude was not relieved by serious application to any branch of
knowledge. Devotion to science and to the advancement of learning, a
virtue which has changed the infamy of even baser natures than his into
glory, never dignified his seclusion. He had elegant tastes, he built
fine palaces, he collected paintings, and he discoursed of the fine arts
with the skill and eloquence of a practised connoisseur; but the nectared
fruits of divine philosophy were but harsh and crabbed to him.

His moral characteristics are even more difficult to seize than his
intellectual traits. It is a perplexing task to arrive at the intimate
interior structure of a nature which hardly had an interior. He did not
change, but he presented himself daily in different aspects. Certain
peculiarities he possessed, however, which were unquestionable. He was
always courageous, generally calm. Placed in the midst of a nation which
hated him, exposed to the furious opposition of the most powerful
adversaries, having hardly a friend, except the cowardly Viglius and the
pluralist Morillon, secretly betrayed by Margaret of Parma, insulted by
rude grandees, and threatened by midnight assassins, he never lost his
self-possession, his smooth arrogance, his fortitude. He was
constitutionally brave. He was not passionate in his resentments. To say
that he was forgiving by nature would be an immense error; but that he
could put aside vengeance at the dictate of policy is very certain. He
could temporize, even after the reception of what he esteemed grave
injuries, if the offenders were powerful. He neve