r the greatness of
his nephew, Roderigo Lenzuoli, known as Borgia in compliment to his
uncle. The last days of Nicholas had been imbittered by the fall of
Constantinople and the imminent peril which threatened Europe from the
Turks. The whole energies of Pius II. were directed towards the one end
of uniting the European nations against the infidel. AEneas Sylvius
Piccolomini, as an author, an orator, a diplomatist, a traveller, and a
courtier, bears a name illustrious in the annals of the Renaissance. As
a Pope, he claims attention for the single-hearted zeal which he
displayed in the vain attempt to rouse the piety of Christendom against
the foes of civilization and the faith. Rarely has a greater contrast
been displayed between the man and the pontiff than in the case of Pius.
The pleasure-loving, astute, free-thinking man of letters and the world
has become a Holy Father, jealous for Christian proprieties, and bent on
stirring Europe by an appeal to motives which had lost their force three
centuries before. Frederick II. and S. Louis closed the age of the
Crusades, the one by striking a bargain with the infidel, the other by
snatching at a martyr's crown. AEneas Sylvius Piccolomini was the mirror
of his times--a humanist and stylist, imbued with the rhetorical and
pseudo-classic taste of the earlier Renaissance. Pius II. is almost an
anachronism. The disappointment which the learned world experienced when
they discovered that the new Pope, from whom so much had been expected,
declined to play the part of their Maecenas, may be gathered from the
epigrams of Filelfo upon his death[1]:--

Gaudeat orator, Musae gaudete Latinae;
Sustulit e medio quod Deus ipse Pium.
Ut bene consuluit doctis Deus omnibus aeque,
Quos Pius in cunctos se tulit usque gravem.
Nunc sperare licet. Nobis Deus optime Quintum
Reddito Nicoleon Eugeniumve patrem.

and again:--

Hac sibi quam vivus construxit clauditur arca
Corpore; nam Stygios mens habet atra lacus.

Pius himself was not unconscious of the discrepancy between his old and
his new self. _AEneam rejicite, Pium recipite_, he exclaims in a
celebrated passage of his Retractation, where he declares his heartfelt
sorrow for the irrevocable words of light and vain romance that he had
scattered in his careless youth. Yet though Pius II. proved a virtual
failure by lacking the strength to lead his age either backwards to the
ideal of earlier Christianity or forwards