The Lord Innocent P.P. VIII made no impression on His age; as a despot, He was an accented failure. “The Patrimony of St. Peter would be the most delightful country in the world if it were not for Colonna and Orsini,” said the Sieur Philippe de Comines, Orator of the Christian King Louis XI of France. The States of the Church became a seething cauldron of lawlessness and licence. Rome herself, “where everything that is shameful or horrible collects and is practised” (_Tacitus_), swarmed with assassins, professional and amateur. Every man who valued his personal safety put on a mail-shirt when he left his naked bed, and set no foot in the streets till he had buckled a sword, or at least a dagger, by his side. The very perfection of these fifteenth century mail-shirts, which could be hidden in two hands, and yet were proof against a thrust or cut at closest quarters, tells its own tale. The trade of an armourer became an honourable art and mystery, when men staked their lives at every turn, as men callously stake money now on their convictions or opinions. A whole embassage from Maximilian, King of the Romans, as the heir of Caesar Friedrich IV was styled, was assailed by brigands and stripped to the shirts in sight of Rome. In July 1492 the Lord Innocent P.P. VIII showed signs of decay, the feebleness of age increased, and He was only kept alive by women’s milk. Modern chroniclers of His last hours have fallen into serious error, in relating that the operation for transfusion of blood was performed by a Hebrew chirurgeon upon the Holiness of the Pope without accomplishing its end. The error arises from forgetfulness of the facts: (α) that the idea of the operation for transfusion could not occur to any one to whom the circulation of the blood was unknown; (β) that the phenomenon of the circulation of the blood was not discovered by Harvey until the seventeenth century. Before the circulation of the blood was known, the visible veins were taken for sinews. Verrochio thought them to be sinews when he carved them on the lean young arms of his alert David. The blood was conceived of as stagnant in the flesh; the heartbeats as a pulsing of the bowels. If the idea of transferring blood from a healthy to a feeble body had occurred to any one of them, the ordinary fifteenth century chirurgeons would not have been contented with a single incision, but would have filled up the weak body through numerous apertures, to be closed with the red hot cautery as usual; and the patient most certainly would have died under the operation, of syncope, caused, not by loss, but by acquisition of blood. Modern historians have misunderstood the words with which Infessura and Raynaldus describe the death of this Pope: and their misunderstanding further is caused by a casual and superficial knowledge of the pharmacy of the fifteenth century. Infessura and Raynaldus say that a certain Jewish physician promised to the Pope’s Holiness the restoration of His health; that he