um pendent Pontifici, qui census annuus nonnunquam viginti
millia ducatos excedit, adeoque Ecclesiae procerum id munus est,
ut una cum Ecclesiarum proventibus etiam lenociniorum numerent
mercedem. Sic enim ego illos supputantes aliquando audivi:
Habet, inquientes, ille duo beneficia, unum curaturn aureorum
viginti, alterum prioratum ducatorum quadraginta, el tres
putanas in burdello, quae reddunt singulis hebdomadibus Julios
Viginti.'

[4] Very few ecclesiastics of high rank escaped the contagion
of Roman society. It was fashionable for men like Bembo and La
Casa to form connections with women of the _demi-monde_ and to
recognize their children, whose legitimation they frequently
procured. The Capitoli of the burlesque poets show that this
laxity of conduct was pardonable, when compared with other
laughingly avowed and all but universal indulgences. Once more,
compare Guidiccioni's letter to M. Giamb. Bernardi Opp. vol. i.
p. 102.

Some of the contempt and hatred expressed by the Italian satirists for
the two great orders of S. Francis and S. Dominic may perhaps be due to
an ancient grudge against them as a Papal police founded in the
interests of orthodoxy. But the chief point aimed at is the mixture of
hypocrisy with immorality, which rendered them odious to all classes of
society. At the same time the Franciscans embraced among their lay
brethren nearly all the population of Italy, and to die in the habit of
the order was thought the safest way of cheating the devil of his due.
Corruption had gone so far and deep that it was universally recognized
and treated with the sarcasm of levity. It roused no sincere reaction,
and stimulated no persistent indignation. Every one acknowledged it; yet
every one continued to live indolently according to the fashion of his
forefathers, acting up to Ovid's maxim--

Pro magna parte vetustas
Creditur; acceptam parce movere fidem.

It is only this incurable indifference that renders Machiavelli's comic
portraits of Fra Alberigo and Fra Timoteo at all intelligible. They are
neither satires nor caricatures, but simple pictures drawn for the
amusement of contemporaries and the stupefaction of posterity.

The criticism of the Italian writers, so far as we have yet followed it,
was directed against two separate evils--the vicious worldliness of
Rome, and the demoralization of the clergy both in their dea