“The Contessa is right,” chimed Porto. “It is quite a different matter to advance a cautious theory for the learned few, than to cast pearls before swine,--I mean to cast sage conclusions before the ignorant.” “We will deal with your second case when it arises,” thrust in Priario grimly, but at this moment the discussion was widened by a question I heard the learned Messere Bembo putting, a little way down the table. “And tell me, my dear Chigi, how the last indulgence in Germany sells? Will it not relieve His Holiness’s financial troubles?” “The sale has hardly begun,” returned the banker; “but since the Archbishop of Mainz has taken it over, it seems likely to prosper tolerably. The appeal to ‘build St. Peter’s Church’ opens purse strings. Then I hear that some admirably clever preachers have been hired to do the hawking.” “Clever?” queried Bembo, looking up from his goblet. “It cannot need great cleverness to bewitch the money from the pouches of those ‘Barbarians,’ as the great Magister Gustiniani called them.” “Yet you wrong our Northern friends,” said Chigi lightly. “True they have more fleas than Latin words, more beer than good wine; and yet they have a hearty rude civility and a learning after the old pious sort. I have been in Nuremberg. I avow it was a passably handsome city.” “Impossible!” challenged the savant. “‘What good can come from such a land of the frozen Hyperboreï?’ as Plato most irrefutably says in the ninth chapter of the Timeaus--” “We do not all understand Greek,” said Chigi deprecatingly. Perhaps he saw that my face was growing red, and that others were looking at me. “In my day I have seen many men of many countries. Believe me, even a blackamoor improves on acquaintance. The French have a good proverb, ‘The absent are always wrong.’” But the secretary arose in the dogmatic pride of a complacent pedant. “I have seen the brutes. I have learned to despise them. The French are tolerable, but the Germans--” a gesture completed his disgust. “Their best Latinist, Erasmus--who is he but a mere schoolboy still conning his Donatus’s grammar?” I was on my feet; Chigi beckoned for silence, but Bembo swept on. “No thanks to Julius Cæsar, I assert, for bringing this disgusting North by his conquests within reach of our civilization. Let them freeze and moulder in their bogs! If their present credulity, ‘the sins of the Germans’ as we say, is profitable to Rome,--whether to build St. Peter’s or to pay His Holiness’s debts--’tis but the just tribute of vice to virtue, of ignorance to learning. I tell you, Chigi, neither you nor another can name a German or a son of a German who was a tolerable scholar, and by habits a virtuoso and a gentleman.” The savant paused for breath. I attacked instantly. I spoke in my best Latin, choosing each word carefully. The wine had only made my senses more acute. I could see Marianna signalling to me “caution,” but my fighting spirit was roused.