angled by Cesare
Borgia's assassin, begged hard that the father of his murderer, the
horrible Alexander, might be entreated to pronounce his absolution. The
same Alexander was nearly suffocated in the Vatican by the French
soldiers who crowded round to kiss his mantle, and who had made him
tremble for his life a few days previously. Cellini on his knees
implored Pope Clement to absolve him from the guilt of homicide and
theft, yet spoke of him as 'transformed to a savage beast' by a sudden
access of fury. At one time he trembled before the awful Majesty of
Christ's Vicar, revealed in Paul III.; at another he reviled him as a
man 'who neither believed in God nor in any other article of religion.
A mysterious sanctity environed the person of the Pontiff. When
Gianpaolo Baglioni held Julius II. in his power in Perugia, he respected
the Pope's freedom, though he knew that Julius would overthrow his
tyranny. Machiavelli condemns this as cowardice, but it was wholly
consistent with the sentiment of the age. 'It cannot have been goodness
or conscience which restrained him,' writes the philosopher of Florence,
'for the heart of a man who cohabited with his sister, and had massacred
his cousins and his nephews, could not have harbored any piety. We must
conclude that men know not how to be either guilty in a noble manner, or
entirely good. Although crime may have a certain grandeur of its own, or
at least a mixture of more generous motives, they do not attain to this.
Gianpaolo, careless though he was about incest and parricide, could not,
or dared not, on a just occasion, achieve an exploit for which the whole
world would have admired his spirit, and by which he would have won
immortal glory: for he would have been the first to show how little
prelates, living and ruling as they do, deserve to be esteemed, and
would have done a deed superior in its greatness to all the infamy, to
all the peril, that it might have brought with it.'[1] It is difficult
to know which to admire most, the superstition of Gianpaolo, or the
cynicism of the commentary, the spurious piety which made the tyrant
miss his opportunity, or the false standard of moral sublimity by which
the half-ironical critic measures his mistake. In combination they
produce a lively impression of the truth of what I have attempted to
establish--that in Italy at this period religion survived as
superstition even among the most depraved, and that the crimes of the
Church had p