Thirty years ago there was published in the _Nuova Antologia_ an article by Domenico Gnoli which sets forth the real history of Pasquino. When Cardinal Carraffa went to live in the Braschi Palace he had the statue set up at one of the corners, and there it has since remained. In those days religious processions were as common as automobiles and bicycles are to-day. The priests in them often rested at this corner, and it became the custom to make up the statue to represent different personages, and the man who was intrusted with this task happened to be a professor in the adjacent university. He encouraged his boys to write epilogues, elegies, and epigrams which they pasted or stuck on the statue. At first these were purely literary efforts, juvenile flights to Parnassus, but later they took on a political and social flavor, while still later they became concerned with the doings of the Curia. These pasquinades have been collected in book form, and some of the volumes exist at the present time. The majority, however, have been lost--perished in flames, destroyed as having no value, or disappeared in other ways. Thus the statue was initiated as a news-bearer or organ of public opinion. Immediately across the road from the statue there was a tailor or barber shop, and the name of the chief operator was Pasquino. It was in this shop that the messages stuck on the statue were collected, deciphered, and discussed, and when the witty tailor died they gave his name to the statue and thus immortality was thrust upon him. In reality, after the cessation of the publications, "Carmina quæ ad Pasquillum fuerunt posita in anno," and the murder of the professor who had encouraged his students to put forth their youthful efforts, men groaning under the oppression of their rulers, men big with ideas of what we now call liberty, men in whom the germs of freedom and equality had been implanted, saw a fairly safe way of getting their sentiments before the public, and they utilized Pasquino as a forum from which they could radiate their ideas and their sentiments. During the entire sixteenth century these men conveyed to the Borgias and to Julius II and Paul III and Innocent X and Innocent XI and Pius VI an expression of their feeling and conviction concerning their conduct, individually and collectively. Whether these contributions had anything to do with shaping public opinion and leading up to the great Reformation, it is impossible to say. Whatever Pasquino accomplished or didn't accomplish seems not to concern him, for there he sits tranquilly upon six blocks of volcanic stone, indifferent to the passing show and to the transpirations of the world.