control over Church property in Italy that 'out of 500 benefices not one is conferred legally.' Compare the passage in the 'Trattato delle Materie Beneficiarie,' p. 163. There Sarpi says that five-sixths of Italian benefices are at the Pope's disposal, and that there is good reason to suppose that he will acquire the remaining sixth.] After the termination of the Council there was nothing left for Pius but to die. He stood upon a pinnacle which might well have made him nervous--lest haply the Solonian maxim, 'Call no man fortunate until his death,' should be verified in his person. During the two years of peace and retirement which he had still to pass, the unsuccessful conspiracy of Benedetto Accolti and Antonio Canossa against his life gave point to this warning. But otherwise, withdrawn from cares of state, which he committed to his nephew, Carlo Borromeo, he enjoyed the tranquillity that follows successful labor, and sank with undiminished prestige into his grave at the end of 1565. Those who believe in masterful and potent leaders of humanity may be puzzled to account for the triumph achieved by this common-place arbiter of destiny. Not by strength but by pliancy of character he accomplished the transition from the mediaeval to the modern epoch of Catholicism. He was no Cromwell, Frederick the Great, or Bismarck; only a politic old man, contriving by adroit avoidance to steer the ship of the Church clear through innumerable perils. This scion of the Italian middle class, this moral mediocrity, placed his successors in S. Peter's chair upon a throne of such supremacy that they began immediately to claim jurisdiction over kings and nations. Thirty-eight years before his death, when Clement VII. was shut up in S. Angelo, it seemed as though the Papal power might be abolished. Forty-five years after his death, Sarpi, writing to a friend in 1610, expressed his firm opinion that the one, the burning question for Europe was the Papal power.[50] Through him, poor product as he was of ordinary Italian circumstances, elected to be Pope because of his easy-going mildness by prelates worn to death in fiery Caraffa's reign, it happened that the flood of Catholic reaction was rolled over Europe. In a certain sense we may therefore regard him as a veritable _Flagellum Dei_, wielded by inscrutable fate. It seems that at momentous epochs of world-history no hero is needed to effect the purpose of the Time-Spirit. A Gian Angelo Medici, agreeable, diplomatic, benevolent, and pleasure-loving, sufficed to initiate a series of events which kept the Occidental races in perturbation through two centuries. [Footnote 50: _Lettere_, vol. ii. p. 167.]