It is curious to observe, that generally throughout the pontifical history, scandalously infamous popes and tolerably decent popes, are found in bunches, or series of six or eight in succession; a striking proof of the fact that when they have been of the better sort, the amelioration has been due to some force of circumstance operative from without. Never were they worse, with perhaps one or two exceptions, than during the century which preceded the first quickly-crushed efforts of the Reformation in Italy—from about 1450, that is to say, down to 1550. Competing Protestantism then began to act on the Roman Church exactly as competing Methodism acted on the Anglican Church three centuries later; and a series of Popes of a different sort was the result. But the conduct of the great family-founding popes, which strikes us, looking at it through the moral atmosphere of the nineteenth century, as so monstrous, wore a very different aspect even to the gravest censors among their contemporaries. The Italian historians of the time tell us of the "royal-mindedness" and "noble spirit" of this ambitious Franciscan, Pope Sixtus, in a tone of evident admiration. And the gross worldliness, the low ambition, and the unscrupulous baseness, of which he may fairly be accused, did not seem even to Du Plessis Mornai,[53] and the French Protestant writers of that stamp, to be sufficient ground for denouncing him and the system which produced him. Otherwise they would not have disgraced themselves and their cause by asserting that he was guilty of hideous and nameless atrocities, for which, as the less zealous but more candid Bayle[54] has sufficiently shown, there is no foundation either in fact or probability. [Sidenote: A POPE'S NEPHEW.]