Cardinal Bartolomeo Sacchi (detto Platina) was “a heathen, and a bad one.” He had to stand his trial on a charge of worshipping false gods, was acquitted for want of evidence, and departed this life in the Odour of Sanctity. Modern discoveries, in the secret recesses of the catacombs, have proved that he was used to carry on his nefarious practices there, with a handful of other extravagant athenians of like kidney. He wrote a History of the Popes, which fairly deserves to be called veracious: but he had a personal grudge against the Lord Paul P.P. II. Who had put him to trial for paganism and grieved him with the torture called The Question; wherefore, he got even with His Holiness when he wrote His life, and a more singular example of truth untruly told would be hard to find. Platina died in the reign of the Lord Xystus P.P. IV; and his History of the Popes was continued by Onofrio Panvinii, who, according to Sir Paul Rycaut, gravely states that, in 1489, the Lord Innocent P.P. VIII permitted mass to be said without wine, in Norway; because, that country being cold and the distance far, the wine either was frozen, or was turned to vinegar, before it could be brought thither. Obviously, Platina and Panvinii require credible corroboration. Messer Stefano Infessura lays himself open to suspicion, as to his bona fides and as to his knowledge, by his remarks on the Lord Xystus P.P. IV. Monsignor Hans Burchard, whose original Diarium awaits discovery, is careless, Teutonic, and petty. The Orators of the Powers compile their state-dispatches from what they have picked up when hanging about the doors of palaces, or from the observations of bribed flunkeys. Messer Paolo Giovio, preconised Bishop of Nocera by the Lord Clement P.P. VII, Messer Francesco Guicciardini, and Messer Benedetto Varchi, were Florentines, who wrote in the Florentine manner, of Rome and Roman affairs, from an antipathetic point of view, and solely on the gossip and tittle-tattle that filtered through to Florence after long years. Yet they wrote in stately delicate language, “Dante’s desiderata,—that illustrious cardinal courtly curial mother-tongue, proper to each Italian state, special to none, whereby the local idioms of every city are to be measured, weighed, compared.” Only—only—the student of their work must know that, (in common with all professional manufacturers of squibs, libels, and lampoons, in every age,) what they liked they praised; and what they loathed they rhetorically and categorically damned, compiling concise catalogues of all the worst crimes known to casuistry, to lay at their foe’s door. Therefore, the student of history must learn the personal sympathies and antipathies of these historians; he must find their personal equation: and, when he has deducted that, he may arrive at least in juxtaposition with truth. This method has been attempted in the present work—in the absence of impersonal authorities.