All this being considered, and man being admittedly a creature of his environment, can we still pretend to horror at this Roderigo and at the fact that being the man he was--prelate though he might be--handsome, brilliant, courted, in the full vigour of youth, and a voluptuary by nature, he should have succumbed to the temptations by which he was surrounded? One factor only could have caused him to use more restraint--the good example of his peers. That example he most certainly had not. Virtue is a comparative estate, when all is said; and before we can find that Roderigo was vile, that he deserves unqualified condemnation for his conduct, we must ascertain that he was more or less exceptional in his licence, that he was less scrupulous than his fellows. Do we find that? To find the contrary we do not need to go beyond the matter which provoked that letter from the Pontiff. For we see that he was not even alone, as an ecclesiastic, in the adventure; that he had for associate on that amorous frolic one Giacopo Ammanati, Cardinal-Presbyter of San Crisogno, Roderigo’s senior and an ordained priest, which--without seeking to make undue capital out of the circumstance--we may mention that Roderigo was not. He was a Cardinal-Deacon, be it remembered.(1) We know that the very Pontiff who admonished these young prelates, though now admittedly a man of saintly ways, had been a very pretty fellow himself in his lusty young days in Siena; we know that Roderigo’s uncle--the Calixtus to whom Pius II refers in that letter as of “blessed memory”--had at least one acknowledged son.(2) We know that Piero and Girolamo Riario, though styled by Pope Sixtus IV his “nephews,” were generally recognized to be his sons.(3) And we know that the numerous bastards of Innocent VIII--Roderigo’s immediate precursor on the Pontifical Throne--were openly acknowledged by their father. We know, in short, that it was the universal custom of the clergy to forget its vows of celibacy, and to circumvent them by dispensing with the outward form and sacrament of marriage; and we have it on the word of Pius II himself, that “if there are good reasons for enjoining the celibacy of the clergy, there are better and stronger for enjoining them to marry.” 1 He was not ordained priest until 1471, after the election of Sixtus IV. 2 Don Francisco de Borja, born at Valencia in 1441. 3 Macchiavelli, Istorie Fiorentine. What more is there to say? If we must be scandalized, let us be scandalized by the times rather than by the man. Upon what reasonable grounds can we demand that he should be different from his fellows; and if we find him no different, what right or reason have we for picking him out and rendering him the object of unparalleled obloquy?