mpt.

It was near about this time that a caricature was circulated in Rome,
representing Sixtus as King Stork and the Romans as frogs vainly
attempting to escape from his devouring beak. _Merito haec patimur_,
"We suffer deservedly," was the legend of the picture, and the moral
it conveyed was a true one. Rome was in such a state as to require the
harshest applications, and the despotic severity of Sixtus did much to
restore decency and security to life. He left the Romans in a far
better condition than he found them; and it would have been well for
Rome, if among his successors there had been more to follow his
example in repressing vice and violence,--in a word, had there been
more King Storks and fewer King Logs.

The most poetic of pasquinades, and one in which wit rises into
imagination, belongs to the pontificate of Urban VIII. (1623-1644.)
This Pope issued a bull excommunicating all persons who took snuff in
the churches of Seville; whereupon Pasquin quoted the following verse
from Job (xiii. 25):--"_Contra folium_ _quod vento rapitur ostendis
potentiam tuam? et stipulam siccam persequeris?_"

This is a very model of satire in its kind, and of a higher kind than
the pasquil, which Coleridge quotes as an example of wit, upon the
Pope who had employed a committee to rip up the errors of his
predecessors.

"Some one placed a pair of spurs on the statue of St. Peter, and a
label from the opposite statue of St. Paul.

"_St. Paul_. Whither, then, are you bound?

"_St. Peter_. I apprehend danger here;--they'll soon call me in
question for denying my Master.

"_St. Paul_. Nay, then, I had better be off, too; for they'll question
me for having persecuted the Christians before my conversion."[12]

In his distinction between the wit of thoughts, of words, and of
images, Coleridge asserts that the first belongs eminently to the
Italians. Such broad assertions are always open to exceptions, and
Pasquin shows that the Romans at least are not less clever in the wit
of words than in that of thoughts. Take, for example, the jest on
Innocent X. which Howel reports in one of his entertaining letters.
This Pope, who, says the candid historian, Mosheim, "to a profound
ignorance of all those things which it was necessary for a Christian
bishop to know, joined the most shameless indolence and the most
notorious profligacy," abandoned his person, his dignity, and his
government to the disposal of Donna Olympia Maldachini, the