river. Leo IV built his wall round this little
city, and fortified it by towers. "In every part he put sculptors of
marble and wrote a prayer," says Platina. One of these gates led to St.
Pellegrino, another was close to the castle of St. Angelo, and was "the
gate by which one goes forth to the open country." The third led to the
School of the Saxons; and over each was a prayer inscribed. These three
prayers were all to the same effect--"that God would defend this new city
which the Pope had enclosed with walls and called by his own name, the
Leonine City, from all assaults of the enemy, either by fraud or by
force."

The greatest, however, of all the conceptions of Pope Nicholas, the very
centre of his great plan, was the library of the Vatican, which he began
to build and to which he left all the collections of his life. Vespasian
gives us a list of the principal among these five thousand volumes, the
things which he prized most, which the Pope bequeathed to the Church and
to Rome. These cherished rolls of parchment, many of them translations
made under his own eyes, were enclosed in elaborate bindings ornamented
with gold and silver. We are not, however, informed whether any of the
great treasures of the Vatican library came from his hands--the good
Vespasian taking more interest in the work of his scribes than in
codexes. He tells us of five hundred scudi given to Lorenzo Valle with a
pretty speech that the price was below his merits, but that eventually he
should have more liberal pay; of fifteen hundred scudi given to Guerroni
for a translation of the _Iliad_, and so forth. It is like a bookseller
of the present day vaunting his new editions to a collector in search of
the earliest known. But Pope Nicholas, like most other patrons of his
time, knew no Greek, nor probably ever expected that it would become a
usual subject of study, so that his translations were precious to him,
the chief way of making his treasures of any practical use.

The greater part, alas! of all his splendor has passed away. One pure and
perfect glory, the little Chapel of San Lorenzo, painted by the tender
hand of Fra Angelico, remains unharmed, the only work of that grand
painter to be found in Rome. If one could have chosen a monument for the
good Pope, the patron and friend of art in every form, there could not
have been a better than this. Fra Angelico seems to have been brought to
Rome by Pope Eugenius, but it was under Nicholas, in two