lian States, together with their profuse expressions of
homage. The festival of his coronation was celebrated with unparalleled
pomp, August 26th. The Borgia arms, a grazing steer, was displayed so
generally in the decorations, and was the subject of so many epigrams,
that a satirist remarked that Rome was celebrating the discovery of the
Sacred Apis. Subsequently the Borgia bull was frequently the object of
the keenest satire; but at the beginning of Alexander's reign it was,
naively enough, the pictorial embodiment of the Pope's magnificence.
To-day such symbolism would excite only derision and mirth, but the
plastic taste of the Italian of that day was not offended by it.

When Alexander, on his triumphal journey to the Lateran, passed the
palace of his fanatical adherents, the Porcari, one of the boys of the
family declaimed with much pathos some stanzas which concluded with the
verses:

Vive diu bos, vive diu celebrande per annos,
Inter Pontificum gloria prima choros.[18]

The statements of Michele Ferno and of Hieronymus Porcius regarding the
coronation festivities and the professions of loyalty of the ambassadors
from the various Italian Powers must be read to see to what extremes
flattery was carried in those days. It is difficult for us to imagine
how imposing was the entrance of this brilliant pope upon the
spectacular stage of Rome at the time when the papacy was at the zenith
of its power--a height it had attained, not through love of the Church,
nor by devotion to religion, which had long been debased, but by
dazzling the luxury-loving people of the age and by modern politics; in
addition to this, the Church had preserved since the Middle Ages a
traditional and mystic character which held the respect of the faithful.

Ferno remarks that the history of the world offered nothing to compare
with the grandeur of the Pope's appearance and the charm of his
person,--and this author was not a bigoted papist, but a diligent
student of Pomponius Laetus. Like all the romanticists of the classic
revival, however, he was highly susceptible to theatrical effects. Words
failed him when he tried to describe the passage of Alexander to
S. Maria del Popolo: "These holiday swarms of richly clad people, the seven
hundred priests and cardinals with their retinues, these knights and
grandees of Rome in dazzling cavalcades, these troops of archers and
Turkish horsemen, the palace guards with long lances and glittering
shi