For the second cause, the greatness of the Roman Empire appeared the greater for their having so little with which to compare it. The empire of the Ottomans had, it is true, by now eclipsed it; but Spain's was a vague wilderness, inhabited by savages; the Persian of old they only knew through the doctored accounts of the Latin writers; and of the overwhelming antiquity and extent of the Chinese they had no real knowledge at all. All, the Turkish excepted, that were not shadowy to them, were what Rome had obliterated, the moral effect of which, associated, as it must needs be, with the name of the city, endured as the chief asset of the Papal power. If any one then had taken Gibbon's view, that the remains of the Roman Empire were approaching dissolution, it would only have been because he thought that the end of the world was equally near. And this unbroken continuity of power did not merely exist, but was alive with fresh life. Nothing had replaced Rome; there was nothing to replace it; there was no need to replace it, since there was nothing effete nor slack about it, however much corruption was patent to the "Reformed." The relations between visitors who were "Reformed" and Rome is another interesting feature of the tourist-life of the time when both were militant and a large proportion of tourists anti-Catholic. Much depended on the reigning Pope. In the time of Sixtus V (1585-90) Protestants came in fear, lived in disguise, and sought protection; Englishmen from Cardinal Allen, who readily granted it for a few days, to enable them to see the antiquities. Clement VIII (1592-1605) was much more lenient, yet Moryson thought it advisable even then to pass for a Frenchman, and to safeguard himself through Cardinal Allen, as well; also to leave before Easter, when there was a house-to-house visitation to enquire if all were communicants. Precautions, on the other hand, might be overdone. It was all very well to make a practice, as one did, of going through a church on the way to his morning drink, in case spies were about, but to tell one's host, as a certain German did, on returning home from an afternoon walk, that he had just been to mass, when all the masses were said in the morning, was going too far! And conforming to custom had its own dangers, too, when it formed a habit, as Moryson found, who, on entering a church at Geneva, reached out his hand towards the poor-box in mistake for the holy-water stoop to which he had accustomed himself; all the more embarrassing a mistake for his being in the company of Theodore Beza.