y would just as soon think of
canonising Judas Iscariot."

"And therefore your Holiness has brought these rats upon us, enlisted, I
nothing doubt, in the infernal regions?"

"Precisely so: Plutonic, necyomantic, Lemurian rats, kindly lent by the
Prince of Darkness for the occasion, and come dripping from Styx to squeak
and gibber in the Capitol. But I note your Holiness's admission that they
belong to a region exempt from your jurisdiction, and that, therefore, your
measures against them, except as regards their status as belligerents, are
for the most part illegitimate and _ultra vires_."

"I would argue that point," replied Alexander the Eighth, "if my lungs were
as tough as when I pleaded before the Rota in Pope Urban's time. For the
present I confine myself to formally protesting against your Holiness's
unprecedented and parricidal conduct in invading your country at the head
of an army of loathsome vermin."

"Unprecedented!" exclaimed Borgia. "Am I not the modern Coriolanus? Did
Narses experience blacker ingratitude than I? Where would the temporal
power be but for me? Who smote the Colonna? Who squashed the Orsini? Who
gave the Popes to dwell quietly in their own house? Monsters of
unthankfulness!"

"I am sure," said Alexander the Eighth soothingly, "that my predecessors'
inability to comply with your Holiness's request must have cost them many
inward tears, not the less genuine because entirely invisible and
completely inaudible. A wise Pope will, before all things, consider the
spirit of his age. The force of public opinion, which your Holiness lately
appeared to disparage, was, in fact, as operative upon yourself as upon any
of your successors. If you achieved great things in your lifetime, it was
because the world was with you. Did you pursue the same methods now, you
would soon discover that you had become an offensive anachronism. It will
not have escaped your Holiness's penetration that what moralists will
persist in terming the elevation of the standard of the Church, is the
result of the so-called improvement of the world."

"There is a measure of truth in this," admitted Alexander the Sixth, "and
the spirit of this age is a very poor spirit. It was my felicity to be a
Pope of the Renaissance. Blest dispensation! when men's view of life was
large and liberal; when the fair humanities flourished; when the earth
yielded up her hoards of chiselled marble and breathing bronze, and
new-found agate urns a