The twentieth century is no whit more chaste than the fifteenth, and can ill afford to cast a stone. Nor was the fifteenth century the stew of universal depravity which some would have us believe it to have been. It was unmoral as the twentieth is immoral. But there were pure and maid-white souls then, as there are now; and the difference between the fifteenth century and the twentieth is a mere difference of fashion. Now, we pretend to be immaculate; then, they bragged of being vile. Much of the literature of the fifteenth century is most suitably presented in the original. Poets and historians, especially historians, allowed little scope for exercise of the imagination. The convention of concealment, of suggestion, had not been invented. Messeri Stefano Infessura and Benedetto Varchi rank among the most eminent chroniclers of their day; certainly the Latin of the one, and the Tuscan of the other, would serve for models: but a complete unbowdlerised translation of the former’s Journal of Roman Affairs (_Diarium Rerum Romanum_), or of the latter’s Florentine History (_Storia Fiorentina_), incontinently would be suppressed by the police. Yet it would be absurd to conclude that these writers, or others of their kidney, have given a just account of the morals of their age. “The divorce court and the police news do not reflect the state of morality in England. No more do Juvenal’s Satires give us a complete or impartial picture of Roman society. We must read side by side with them the contemporary letters of Pliny, which give a very different picture, and also weigh the evidence offered by inscriptions.” (E. G. Hardy. Satires of Juvenal, p. xliv.) That is the spirit in which the student of the fifteenth century should approach his task. He will read all, and hear all sides, and form his own conclusion, which, at best, must be a faulty one, until the secrets of all hearts are known. The Vicechancellor-Cardinal-Archdeacon was a human being. If he were, as Gaspar Veronensis describes him at a later date, “a comely man, of cheerful countenance and honeyed discourse, who gains the affections of all the women he admires, and attracts them as the loadstone attracts iron,” what must he have been in the glow of his superb youth? This is not by any means a suitable reputation for a churchman; and only its non-singularity prevents it from being a disgraceful one. Viewed from a theological stand-point, Cardinal Rodrigo’s carnal lusts are, of course, wholly indefensible: but this work is an attempt at the study of certain human beings prominent in history; and not a theological treatise nor an act of the _advocatus diaboli_. The Lord Pius P.P. II has said, “If there are good reasons for enjoining celibacy of the clergy, there are better and stronger auguments for insisting on their marriage”; and that Supreme Pontiff was far and away the wisest and most observing man of His Own (or perhaps of any) time.