ly seated in high places, remained
untouched. Luther meanwhile had carried all before him in the North, and
accurate observers in Rome itself dreaded some awful catastrophe for the
guilty city. 'This state is set upon the razor-edge of peril; God grant
we have not soon to take flight to Avignon or to the ends of the ocean.
I see the downfall of this spiritual monarchy at hand. Unless God help,
it is all over with us.'[3] Adrian met the emergency, and took up arms
against the sea of troubles by expressing his horror of simony,
sensuality, thievery and so forth. The result was that he was simply
laughed at. Pasquin made so merry with his name that Adrian vowed he
would throw the statue into the Tiber; whereupon the Duke of Sessa
wittily replied: 'Throw him to the bottom, and, like a frog, he'll go on
croaking.' Berni, again, wrote one of his cleverest Capitoli upon the
dunce who could not comprehend his age; and when he died, his doctor's
door was ornamented with this inscription: _Liberatori patriae Senatus
Populusque Romanus_.

[1] See Greg. _Stadt Rom_, vol. viii. pp. 382, 383. The details
about Adriano are chiefly taken from the _Relazioni_ of the
Venetian embassadors, series ii. vol. iii. pp. 75-120.

[2] His father's name was Florus or Flerentius, of the Flemish
family, it is supposed, of Dedel. Berni calls him a
carpet-maker. Other accounts represent him as a ship's
carpenter. The Pope's baptismal name was Adrian.

[3] See the passage quoted from the _Lettere de Principi_,
Rome, March 17, 1523, by Burckhardt, p. 99, note.

Great was the rejoicing when another Medici was made Pope in 1523.
People hoped that the merry days of Leo would return. But things had
gone too far toward dissolution. Clement VII. failed to give
satisfaction to the courtiers whom his more genial cousin had delighted:
even the scholars and the poets grumbled.[1] His rule was weak and
vacillating, so that the Colonna faction raised its head again and drove
him to the Castle of S. Angelo. The political horizon of Italy grew
darker and more sullen daily, as before some dreadful storm. Over Rome
itself impended ruin--

as when God
Will o'er some high-viced city hang his poison
In the sick air.[2]

At last the crash came. Clement by a series of treaties, treacheries,
and tergiversations had deprived himself of every friend and exasperated
every foe. Italy was so worn out wi