But the huge fiction, which grew to be so large and so strong as to require the united efforts of several able literary men armed with many heavy volumes to kill it, was, like so many another dangerous mistake, a very small and innocent error at its birth. The pious pilgrim _had_ come back from Rome. He _had_ brought with him a whole budget of stories of the scandalous corruptions and wickedness he had witnessed in the metropolis of Christendom. He _had_ asserted, and probably frequently repeated, that a female ruled the Church. He _had_ asserted the astounding fact, that a woman was now Pope of Rome. And the scandalised reporter of the abominations he had witnessed in that far distant southern land across the mountains, spoke with all sincerity. He little dreamed of letting loose a falsehood, which as soon as ever it had escaped from "the enclosure of his teeth," as old Homer says, forthwith began to race with unovertakeable swiftness round the world, like the unbagged demon of a mediæval goblin–story. He simply spoke figuratively. And his simple–minded, untravelled, wonder–loving auditor or auditors received his words literally. That was all! But with what a mass of infinitely more deadly error has that same little difference between the speaker and his hearers, filled the world! The ninth century pilgrim merely intended to convey to his hearers, in the strongest manner he could, the fact that the Pontiff was so wholly influenced and governed by a woman, that she held all the power in her hands, and _might be said_, indeed, to be Pope herself, rather than the weak puppet who was her slave. And if in the seventeenth century communications between one part of the world and another had been as rare and as difficult as in the ninth; if men had been then as ignorant, as simple, and greedy of the marvellous; if the press, which is to such error what a terrier is to a rat, had not been in existence, the historians of Europe might have chronicled a second she–pontiff, the "Pope Olympia," as having ascended the papal throne in the year 1644. For assuredly no John, Benedict, nor Boniface of the worst and darkest age of the Church ever lived more scandalously under petticoat government, or gave greater occasion to the assertion, that a woman was the real Pope in his stead, than did Giovanni Batista Pamfili, who was elected in that year.