The Lord Calixtus P.P. III was by no means the enemy of letters. He made havoc among the decadents, the affected literary poseurs who infested the Borgian as well as the Victorian Era; but He cherished genius, and to scholars of distinction He was a generous patron. The diverting case of Messer Lorenzo Valla will serve for an example. This notable, being one of the secretaries of King Don Alonso I, was well-known to the Holiness of the Pope. He was erudite beyond most of his contemporaries, of a daring temperament, and impatient of bad scholarship, falsehood, and superstition. In 1440 he indited a merciless exposure of the monstrous fiction now known as the Forged Decretals and Donation of Constantine, upon which, in perfect good faith, the temporal dominions of the Papacy then were held. Also, he attacked the leaden Latin of the Vulgate, and lauded the Golden Latin of Vergil and Cicero, or the Silver Latin of Tacitus. The twentieth century—which knows the Latin of the Roman Mass to be the low Latin of Roman plebeians of the first five centuries, from the age of the Lord St. Peter P.P. to that of His successor the Lord St. Gelasius P.P., Whose “Prayer for Peace” is the latest known addition to the canon—will not find Messer Lorenzo Valla to have been guilty of any very shocking crime herein. But the clergy of Naples considered him in the light of a menace to the Christian Palladium, and mentioned him to the Inquisition. When he was brought before them, the Inquisitors invited him formally to assent to a profession of faith, which was neither the Apostles’ nor the Nicene Creed, nor the Creed of St. Athanasius, but one which they had drawn up to suit the fancied needs of his case. The situation was the historical parallel of one which sullied the dying years of the last century. Messer Lorenzo knew too much; took an impish delight in saying what he knew; he was a nuisance, a disturbing influence. To the proposition of the Inquisition he opposed a firm refusal; he would not sign their specimen of a creed. The circumstances now were becoming strained. But the Inquisitors of the fifteenth century had more serpentine wisdom than those of the nineteenth. They did not proceed at once to an abrupt and tactless excommunication, exacerbating to all parties. They tried another line. Would Messer Lorenzo Valla have the courtesy, then, to propound his own creed, that his judges might examine whether it were heretical or no? The reply of Messer Lorenzo was delicious. “I believe,” he said, “I believe what Holy Mother Church believes. She _knows_ nothing. But—I _believe_ what she _believes_.” Just at this stage the king sent a mandate to the Inquisitors of Naples, bidding them to leave his Majesty’s secretary alone; and the process ended here. But when the news of the case travelled to Rome, the Lord Nicholas P.P. V, admiring the wit and learning of Messer Lorenzo Valla, being amused, perhaps, at