Leo X. contemplated seriously the dangers which threatened Christendom, and resolved to arm the principal powers of Europe against the Turks. The sovereign pontiff announced his project to the college of cardinals. The prelates most distinguished for their learning and their skill in negotiations, were sent into England, Spain, and Germany, with the mission of appeasing all quarrels that divided princes, and forming a powerful league against the enemies of the Christian republic. Leo X., who declared himself beforehand the head of this holy league, proclaimed a truce of five years among all the states of Europe, and threatened those who disturbed the peace with excommunication. Whilst the pope was thus giving all his attention to preparations for a crusade, the poets and orators, whose labours he encouraged, represented him as already the liberator of the Christian world. The celebrated Vida, in a Sapphic ode addressed to Leo X., sang the future labours and conquests of the pontiff. Carried away by his poetical enthusiasm, he swore to go, clad in shining steel, to the extremities of the world, and to drink from a brazen helmet the waters of the Xanthus and the Indus. He boasts of cutting down with his sword the barbarous heroes of Asia, and fancies that he already sees posterity placing his name among those of warriors who had never known fear. Vida, in his ode, speaks of neither Christ nor the cross, but of Bellona and Apollo. His verses appear to be much less an inspiration of the Gospel than an imitation of Horace; and the praises he addresses to the head of the Christian Church resemble, both in tone and form, those which the bard of the Tiber addressed to Augustus. Whilst Vida, in profane verses, thus felicitated Leo X. upon the laurels he was about to gather amidst the labours and perils of a holy war, another writer not less celebrated, in a prose epistle printed at the head of the Orations of Cicero, addressed the sovereign pontiff with the same congratulations and the same eulogies. Novagero took delight in celebrating beforehand those days of glory in which the pope would return in triumph to the eternal city, after having extended the limits of the Christian world,—those happy days in which all Italy, in which all nations, should revere him as a divinity descended from heaven for their deliverance.