o tradition, between the Palazzo Rospigliosi and
the Palazzo della Consulta. In the times of Sixtus the Fifth, they were
in a pitiable state, their forelegs and tails gone, their necks broken,
their heads propped up by bits of masonry. When he finished the Quirinal
palace he restored them and set them up, side by side, before the
entrance, and when Pius the Sixth changed their position and turned them
round, the ever conservative and ever discontented Roman people were
disgusted by the change. On the pedestal of one of them are the words,
'Opus Phidiae,' 'the work of Phidias,' A punning placard was at once
stuck upon the inscription with the legend, 'Opus Perfidiae Pii
Sexti'--'the work of perfidy of Pius the Sixth.'

The Quirinal palace cannot be said to have played a part in the history
of Rome. Its existence is largely due to the common sense of Sixtus the
Fifth, and to his love of good air. He was a shepherd by birth, and it
is recorded that the first of his bitter disappointments was that the
farmer whom he served set him to feed the pigs because he could not
learn how to drive sheep to pasture; a disgrace which ultimately made
him run away, when he fell in with a monk whose face he liked. He
informed the astonished father that he meant to follow him everywhere,
'to Hell, if he chose,'--which was a forcible if not a pious
resolution,--and explained that the pigs would find their way home
alone. Later, when he had quarrelled with all the monks in Naples,
including his superiors, he came to Rome, and, being by that time very
learned, he was employed to expound the 'Formalities' of Scotus to the
'Signor' Marcantonio Colonna, abbot of the Monastery of the Apostles;
and there he resided as a guest for a long time till his brilliant pupil
was himself master of the subject, as well as a firm friend of the
quarrelsome monk; and in their intercourse the seeds were no doubt sown
of that implacable hatred against the Orsini which, under the great and
just provocation of a kinsman's murder, ended in the exile and temporary
ruin of the Colonna's rivals. No doubt, also, the abbot and the monk
often strolled together in the Colonna gardens, and the future Pope
breathed the high air of the Quirinal hill with a sense of relief, and
dreamed of living up there, far above the city, literally in an
atmosphere of his own. Therefore, when he was Pope, he made the great
palace that crowns the eminence, completing and extending a much small