s that he had enough to return to Bologna to his
studies, though in Florence he had not lost his time, for he read in
every faculty."

Such were the early years of one of the most cultured and princely of
the Popes. Born in 1398, he was himself one of the sons of the early
Renaissance. Not altogether without pedantry, he yet by his learning, by
his patronage of scholars and artists (and indeed he was perhaps the
first Pope who preferred them to monks and friars), secured for the
Renaissance the allegiance of the Church. He died in a moment of
misfortune for Europe in 1455, just after the fall of Constantinople,
being succeeded on the throne of Christendom by Pius II, Pius Aeneas as
he called himself in a moment of enthusiasm, one of the most human of
all those men of the world who have become the vicegerent of Jesus.
Nicholas V was not a man of the world, he was a scholar, full of the
enthusiasm of his day. As a statesman, while he pacified Italy, he saw
Byzantium fall into the hands of the barbarians. He was a Pagan in whom
there was no guile. His enthusiasm was rather for Apollo and the Muses
than for Jesus and the Saints. With a simplicity touching and
delightful, he watched Sigismondo Malatesta build his temple at Rimini,
and was his friend and loved him well. Pius II, with all his love of
nature and the classics, though his own life was full of unfortunate
secrets and his pride and vanity truly Sienese, could not look on
unmoved while Malatesta built a temple to the old gods in the States of
the Church. But then Pius had not lived all the long years of his youth
at Luna Nova. Who can tell what half-forgotten deity may have found
Maestro Tomaso asleep in the woods, that magician Virgil in his
hands,--for on this coast the gods wander even yet,--and, creeping
behind him, finding him so fair, may have kissed him on the ears, as the
snakes kissed Cassandra when she lay asleep at noon in Troy of old.
Certainly their habitations, their old places may still be found. We are
not so far from Porto Venere, and then on the highway towards Massa, not
long after you have come out of the beautiful avenue of plane trees,
itself like some great temple, through which the road leaves Sarzana,
you come upon the little city of Luna, or the bright fragments of it,
among the sand of what must once have been the seashore, with here a
fold of the old amphitheatre, there the curve of the circus, while
scattered on the grass softer than sle