to what is called the golden age of
Italian culture. As a man, he was well qualified to represent the
neo-pagan freedom of the Renaissance. Saturated with the spirit of his
period, he had no sympathy with religious earnestness, no conception of
moral elevation, no aim beyond a superficial polish of the understanding
and the taste. Good Latinity seemed to him of more importance than true
doctrine: Jupiter sounded better in a sermon than Jehovah; the
immortality of the soul was an open topic for debate. At the same time
he was extravagantly munificent to men of culture, and hearty in his
zeal for the diffusion of liberal knowledge. But what was reasonable in
the man was ridiculous in the pontiff. There remained an irreconcilable
incongruity between his profession of the Primacy of Christianity and
his easy epicurean philosophy.

Leo, like all the Medici after the first Cosimo, was a bad financier.
His reckless expenditure contributed in no small measure to the
corruption of Rome and to the ruin of the Latin Church, while it won the
praises of the literary world. Julius, who had exercised rigid economy,
left 700,000 ducats in the coffers of S. Angelo. The very jewels of
Leo's tiara were pledged to pay his debts, when he died suddenly in
1521. During the heyday of his splendor he spent 8,000 ducats monthly
on presents to his favorites and on his play-debts. His table, which
was open to all the poets, singers, scholars, and buffoons of Rome,
cost half the revenues of Romagna and the March. He founded the
knightly Order of S. Peter to replenish his treasury, and turned the
conspiracy of the Cardinal Petrucci against his life to such good
account--extorting from the Cardinal Riario a fine of 5,000 ducats, and
from the Cardinals Soderini and Hadrian the sum of 125,000--that Von
Hutten was almost justified in treating the whole of that dark business
as a mere financial speculation. The creation of thirty-nine Cardinals
in 1517 brought him in above 500,000 ducats. Yet, in spite of these
expedients for getting gold, the bankers of Rome were half ruined when
he died. The Bini had lent him 200,000 ducats; the Gaddi, 32,000; the
Ricasoli, 10,000; the Cardinal Salviati claimed a debt of 80,000; the
Cardinals Santi Quattro and Armellini, each 150,000.[1] These figures
are only interesting when we remember that the mountains of gold which
they denote were squandered in aesthetic sensuality.

When the Pope was made, he said to Giuliano