Though I bring no trained eye or accurate information to the discussion of Pasquino's identity, I am convinced, since seeing the bronze statue of a boxer which Lanciani unearthed in excavating the Baths of Constantine in 1885, that this statue is no other than an early marble setting forth the same subject. To me it is the effigy of a fighting brute. Whatever his name or his profession may have been, he has become known the world over as Pasquino, and satires and sarcasms similar to those which he is supposed to have uttered to the amusement and edification of the Romans in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries have become known as pasquinades all over the world. Italians like to write stories concerning historic incidents and to embellish them with a veneer of verisimilitude. They like particularly to give them a personal note, deprecatory or laudatory. When the Egyptian obelisk was being forced to a perpendicular position in the Piazza of St. Peter's, the crowd had been admonished under penalty of death to be silent. The stillness of the piazza, broken only by the creaking of the ropes, was suddenly torn asunder by a shout of "Wet the ropes." Thus the famous obelisk was preserved intact, and the man whose discernment had accomplished it, instead of having his head cut off, was allowed to furnish the palms for St. Peter's every Palm Sunday. Incidentally he was ennobled, and since that time his reward has been the family's chief asset. In the same way, one of the river gods of the fountain set up in the middle of the Piazza Navona seems to be drawing a mantle up over his head while the others, those of the Danube, the Ganges, and the Rio della Plata, are looking straight ahead. Bernini, who built the fountain, says that Nile was so shocked by the façade which Borromini, a contemporary architect, added to the Church of St. Agnes, which is immediately in front of it, that he had to veil his face. The story of Pasquino is that he asked questions concerning the conduct of the reigning power, which, of course, in those days was the pope, and made reflections which Marforio, the river god which stood between the horse-tamers in the Piazza della Quirinale, answered. Pasquino, in short, became the organ of public opinion, and it was not subject to the censor, for the authors prudently kept out of sight. His most poisonous venom and destructive wrath were directed against popes and cardinals. If he said the things that he is alleged to have said about Alexander VI and Innocent XI (the holy man who started the Inquisition), it is easy to understand that one of their successors wished to throw him into the bottom of the Tiber, the resting-place of countless priceless objects of art for many centuries. As a matter of fact, however, the stories about Pasquino to be found in every guide-book are, like many other stories when run to earth, largely fiction.