of Francis and the cold selfishness of Charles; and now the latter had
arrived amidst the ruins which he had made, to receive his crown from the
hands of a pope who was true to Italy, if false to all the world besides,
and whom, but two years before, he had imprisoned and disgraced. We think
of Clement as the creature of the emperor, and such substantially he
allowed himself to be; but his obedience was the obedience of fear to a
master whom he hated, and the bishop of Tarbes, who was present at the
coronation, and stood at his side through the ceremony, saw him trembling
under his robes with emotion, and heard him sigh bitterly.[253] Very
unwillingly, we may be assured, he was compelled to act his vacillating
part to England, and England, at this distance of time, may forgive him for
faults to which she owes her freedom, and need not refuse him some tribute
of sympathy in his sorrows.

Fallen on evil times, which greater wisdom and greater courage than had for
many a century been found in the successors of St. Peter would have failed
to encounter successfully, Clement VII. remained, with all his cowardice, a
true Italian; his errors were the errors of his age and nation, and were
softened by the presence, in more than usual measure, of Italian genius and
grace. Benvenuto Cellini, who describes his character with much minuteness,
has left us a picture of a hot-tempered, but genuine and kind-hearted man,
whose taste was elegant, and whose wit, from the playful spirit with which
it was pervaded, and from a certain tendency to innocent levity, approached
to humour. He was liable to violent bursts of feeling; and his inability to
control himself, his gesticulations, his exclamations, and his tears, all
represent to us a person who was an indifferent master of the tricks of
dissimulation to which he was reduced, and whose weakness entitles him to
pity, if not to respect. The papacy had fallen to him at the crisis of its
deepest degradation. It existed as a politically organised institution,
which it was convenient to maintain, but from which the private hearts of
all men had fallen away; and it depended for its very life upon the support
which the courts of Europe would condescend to extend to it. Among these
governments, therefore, distracted as they were by mutual hostility, the
pope was compelled to make his choice; and the fatality of his position
condemned him to quarrel with the only prince on whom, at the outset of
the