We need not enter into all the details of this fourth attempt in half a century to evade the most positive and sincere commands of the Pope. It was a race with death, and the most determined and unscrupulous efforts were made by the Jesuits to prevent the Pope from reaching his goal before death overtook him. Sixtus had to punish one Jesuit for making a very pointed eulogy of Cardinal Cajetan, his rival and enemy, and to arrest another for regretting in public that they had not a Gregory on the throne in such troubled times. The dying despot fiercely concentrated his sinking energy on his last task. When Bellarmine's new book _De Summi Pontificis Potestate_ appeared, he put it on the Index, although he liked Bellarmine, and the book really magnified the papal power so much that it was afterwards condemned as seditious at Paris. As the cardinals still thwarted him, he sent a stern personal order to Acquaviva to change the name of his Society. He was not far from death, but the General was told that there could be no more shiftiness; he might, however, ask for the change instead of having it imposed on him. He signed the petition and the Pope drew up his decree. He died before he could publish it. There is no serious ground for the faint rumour that the Jesuits poisoned Sixtus V. His death was foreseen by everybody, and the Jesuits knew from experience that his decree would die with him. But Roman gossip found the coincidence too romantic to let it pass. Acquaviva had ordered a _novena_ (nine days of prayer) to be said for Sixtus in the Jesuit houses when his illness was announced. The bell was ringing for Vespers on the ninth day when the aged Pope passed away; and for many a year afterwards it was a grim, half-serious joke of the Romans to wonder, when they heard the Jesuit Vesper-bell, whether it rang out the life of another Pope.