Surely, whichever version of the story may be believed, as to Pescara's original intentions, there is enough here in evidence to go far towards justifying Chancellor Morone's opinion, that he was one of the worst and most faithless men in Italy. Some modern Italian writers, with little moral, and less historical knowledge, have rested the gravamen of the charge against him on his want of patriotic Italian feeling on the occasion. In the first place, no such motive, however laudable in itself, could have justified him in being guilty of the treason proposed to him. In the second place, the class of ideas in question can hardly be found to have had any existence at that period, although distinct traces of such may be met with in Italian history 200 years earlier. Certainly the Venetian Senate were not actuated by any such; and still more absurd would it be to attribute them to Pope Clement. It is possible that Morone, and perhaps still more, Giberti, may not have been untinctured by them. [Sidenote: PESCARA'S SPANISH TENDENCIES.] But Pescara was one of the last men, even had he been as high-minded as we find him to have been the reverse, in whom to look for Italian "_fuori i barbari_" enthusiasm. Of noble Spanish blood, his family had always been the counsellors, friends, and close adherents of a Spanish dynasty at Naples, and the man himself was especially Spanish in all his sympathies and ideas. "He adopted,"[182] says Giovio, "in all his costume the Spanish fashion, and always preferred to speak in that language to such a degree, that with Italians, and even with Vittoria his wife, he talked Spanish." And elsewhere he is said to have been in the habit of expressing his regret that he was not born a Spaniard.