Page:Cambridge Modern History Volume 2.djvu/50

 members of the Conclave, and hardly anything of the temporal power was left to the Pope. The Cardinals de' Medici and Cajetan (de Vio) rescued the assembly from this confusion of opinions and unruly passions by proposing an absent candidate. None of the factions had thought of Adrian Dedel; the astonished populace heaped scorn and epigrams on the Cardinals and their choice. Adrian, who was acting as Charles' vicegerent in Spain at the time of his election, could not take up his residence at Rome till August 29; it then looked, as Castiglione says, like a plundered abbey; the Curia was ruined and poverty-stricken, half their number had fled before the prevailing pestilence. The simple-minded old man had brought his aged housekeeper with him from the Netherlands; he was contented with few servants and spent but a ducat a day for maintenance. He would have preferred to live in some simple villa with a garden; in the Vatican among the remains of heathen antiquity he seemed to himself to be rather a successor of Constantine than of St Peter. His plan of action included the restoration of peace to Italy and Europe, a protective war against the invading Turks, the reform of the Curia and the Church, and the establishment of peace in the German Church. Not one of these tasks was he able to fulfil; he was destined only to show his good intentions. We shall deal presently with his attempts at reformation, which have for all time made him worthy of admiration and his short pontificate memorable. He was not lacking in good intentions to make Rome once more the centre of intellectual life; but Reuchlin had lately died; Erasmus, to whom the Pope had written on December 1, 1522, preferred to remain in Germany; Sadoleto went to Carpentras; and Bembo, who thought Adrian's pontificate even more unfortunate than Leo's death, stayed quietly in northern Italy. Evidently no one had confidence in the permanency of a state of things which could not but appear abnormal to everybody. And indeed, the silent, pedantic Dutchman, with his cold nature, his ignorance of Italian, his handful of servants, "Flemings stupid as a stone," was the greatest possible contrast to everything that the refinement of Italian culture and the well-justified element of Latin grace and charm demanded of a prince. The Italians would have put up for a year or two at least with an austere and pious Pope, if his piety had been blended with something of poetry and grace; but this Dutch saint was utterly incomprehensible to them. And in truth this was not entirely their fault. As Girolamo Negri wrote, one really could apply to him Cicero's remark about Cato: "he behaves as if he had to do with Plato's Republic instead of the scum of the earth that Romulus collected." And it must have been unbearable for the Romans that the new Pope should have as little comprehension for all the great art of the Renaissance as for classical antiquity. He wanted to throw Pasquino into the Tiber because the jests pasted on the statue irritated him; at the sight of the Laocoon he turned away with the words, "These are heathen idols." He closed the Belvedere, and even a man like Negri