Sixtus V became the richest sovereign of the day; he was often heard to say that a king without money was nobody, and he always had plenty ready to his hand. There were no means of borrowing in those days; only two public banks existed, those of Venice and Genoa, and neither of them lent money even on the most undeniable security. Any man, even the head of a state, if he wanted to lay his hand on specie must save it and put it by. Sixtus was wedded to economy, and the fruits thereof were deposited in St. Angelo. He bent every effort to gather in the rich harvest. He taxed his people heavily; imposed duties upon all articles of produce, even for a time upon wine, a most unpopular measure. His savings in due course amounted to vast sums; his deposit in the castle at the end of his reign was three million scudi in gold, and a million scudi in silver, all of which constituted a very solid backbone of wealth. Not that this implied a solid financial system; for the moneys thus hoarded were taken out of circulation and meant so much dead capital withdrawn from currency and useless in fostering commercial industry. Moreover, the taxation by which the pope gathered his funds together was undoubtedly burdensome and injurious to the people. It is little likely that such a despotic ruler as Sixtus V would escape criticism; he was constantly lampooned and held up to ridicule in the manner dear to the witty Romans, but full of danger even when it was done anonymously. He was constantly exposed to satirical jests which were pasted up on the statue called the Pasquino, the mutilated part of a great group representing Menelaus dragging the dead body of Patroclus from the walls of Troy. This statue stood against the walls of the Orsini palace close to the corner where another more splendid building, the Braschi palace, was afterwards built. This shapeless fragment was generally considered one of the noblest works of ancient art. A witty tailor, named Pasquino, at one time kept a shop nearly opposite the statue, which was nicknamed after him. The wits of the city frequented Pasquino’s shop to interchange scandalous gossip and pungent jokes and the place became famous. When the street was repaired the statue was removed and was erected alongside the shop, and the custom was established of making it a sort of notice board; the epigrams pasted up were known as _pasquinata_, the origin of our word “pasquinade.” This was early in the sixteenth century, from which time forth Pasquino became a name much dreaded and the vehicle of many bitter sayings. The government vainly tried to silence him and get rid of the statue. One pope, Adrian VI, who had been deeply offended by some sarcastic lines, would have thrown it into the Tiber, but a wise Spanish legate warned him to forbear lest the frogs in the river should learn to croak pasquinades. Another pope, Paul III, was asked by the statue how much he would give it to hold its tongue? A collection of the early pasquinades