On the contrary, all sorts of festivities, mingling themselves with the more serious business of prosperous ambition, seem to have made up the life of the young Count and Countess. One constantly recurring cause of pomp and festival at Rome in those days, was the arrival in the eternal city of strangers of note from almost every part of Europe. English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Greek ambassadors, cardinals, or prelates, arrived in the great capital of Christianity to ask favours of Heaven's vicegerent; to plead their international or ecclesiastical causes and quarrels before him; to bring him gifts and compliments from distant potentates; to beg for assistance in money or money's worth; to obtain absolution for national sins committed against the Papal interest; or to secure aid and connivance for such as could be shown to square with it. [Sidenote: GALA DOINGS AT ROME.] On the occasion of such arrivals, cardinals, with their numerous retinues of attendants, lay and clerical, used to go out to meet the strangers at the gate, and bring them in pomp to the lodgings prepared for them. Then followed grand ceremonial services in the basilicas, in which modern Circenses the Roman populace shared with delight, and vast banquets, shared only by the privileged of the earth. Now and then occur descriptions of gay doings of a less exclusive character, in which all classes of that strangely-variegated society are seen mingled in a more pleasing and more picturesque fashion. On Wednesday,[82] the 22nd of March, 1480, for instance, Ernest, Duke of Saxony, arrives at Rome for the performance of a vow. He is accompanied by the Duke of Brunswick and other German nobles. All are clothed in black, with a staff embroidered in white across the breast, as a symbol of pilgrimage. The Pope and all the Sacred College go out to the Porta del Popolo to meet him; and fortunately we have among us two cardinals who can talk German. These ride one on each side of his Serene Highness, and thus the cortège of some two hundred horses of the Duke's retinue, together with all the trains of Pope and cardinals, sweep on through the streets of Rome towards St. Peter's. Sovereign princes coming to Rome in discharge of vows of pilgrimage are worthy of every encouragement. So Sixtus treats the noble stranger with all possible honour—even to the extent of allowing him to sit at mass and vespers on the bench of the cardinals, and in the stall next below the junior of those dignitaries, an honour rarely granted. Then, as is the case with those whom Rome delighteth to honour, he was presented in St. Peter's with the consecrated golden rose. But on this occasion, strangely enough, the golden rose was not a rose, but a golden oak-bough,[83] which Sixtus, contrary to all custom and precedent, had chosen to consecrate instead of the immemorially accustomed emblem. The substitution of this golden bough, the well-known heraldic bearing