sent this custom is prohibited under the heaviest
penalties."]

[Footnote 3: Mrs. Piozzi, in her amusing _Journey through Italy_, ii.
113, quotes these verses and gives a translation of them which shows
that she quite mistook their point. In spite of her quoting Latin,
Greek, and even on occasion Hebrew, her scholarship was not very
accurate or deep.]

[Footnote 4: The Historie of Guicciardin, reduced into English by
Geffray Fenton. 1579. p. 308. Another epigram of barbarous bitterness
against Alexander refers, if we understand it aright, to one of the
gloomiest events of his pontificate, the murder of his son Giovanni,
Duca di Gandia, by his other son, Caesar Borgia. Giovanni was killed
at night, and his body was thrown into the Tiber, from which it was
recovered the next morning.

Piscatorem hominum ne te non, Sexte, putemus,
Piscaris natum retibus ecce tuum."

"Lest we should not fancy you, O Sextus,
a fisher of men, you fish for your own son
with nets."]

[Footnote 5: Vasari relates, that Michel Angelo, when he was making
the bronze statue of Julius, at Bologna, having asked the Pope if he
should put a book in his left hand,--"No," replied the fiery old man,
"put a sword in it, for I know not letters": "_Mettivi una spada, che
io non so lettere._"]

[Footnote 6: At the beginning of his pontificate, upon occasion of
Leo's taking possession of the Lateran with a solemn procession, an
arch of triumph was erected at the bridge of Sant' Angelo, which bore
an inscription worthy of the tailor's successor:--

"Olim habuit Cypria sua tempera, tempora Mavors
Olim habuit, sua nunc tempora Pallas habet."

"Venus once had her time, Mars also has
had his, but now Minerva rules."]

[Footnote 7: In Murray's _Handbook for Rome_, a book for the most part
of great accuracy, there is a curious blunder in the account of
Pasquin. It is said, that, "on the election of Pope Leo X., in 1440,
the following satirical acrostic appeared, to mark the date
MCCCCXL:--'_Multi caeci cardinales creaverunt caecum decimum (X)
Leonem:_ 'Many blind cardinals have created a tenth blind Lion.'" Now
in 1440 Leo was not born, and no Pope was chosen in that year. Leo was
not made Pope till 1513, and the acrostic has apparently nothing to do
with the date of his accession to the pontificate.]

[Footnote 8: One of those copies was formerly in the Royal Library at
Munich, and sold as a duplicate. The other has the bookplate