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440 subjugation of Italy. But the marrow of things does not lie in the making of a distinct principality, or in the price paid for it, or in the means by which its makers wrought. Other causes changed the axis of the world. Within the folds of temporal monarchy an ecclesiastical process was going on of more concern to us than the possession or the partition of Italy. De Maistre's argument that those who deem absolutism legitimate in the State have no foothold to resist it in the Church, had been proclaimed already by a writer favourably known to Mr. Creighton : "Nemo est tarn parvae urbis dominus, qui a se appellari ferat : et nos Papam appellationi subiectum dicemus ? At si me, ais, Pontifex indigne premit, quid agam ? Redi ad eum supplex ; ora, onus levet. At si rogatus, interpellates nolit subvenire misero, quid agam ? Quid agis, ubi tuus te princeps saecularis urget ? Feram, dices, nam aliud nullum est remedium. Et hie ergo feras ! "The miscarriage of reform left the Holy See on a solitary height never reached before. It was followed by indifference and despair, by patient watching for a new departure, by helpless schemes to push philosophy across the margin exposed by the religious ebb. We are familiar with the antipathy of Machiavelli and the banter of Erasmus ; but the primary fact in the papal economy of that age is not the manifold and ineffective opposition, but the positive strengthening of authority and its claims. The change is marked by the extremity of adulation which came in about the time of Alexander. He is semideus, deus alter in terris, and, in poetry, simply deus. The belief that a soul might be rescued from purgatory for a few coppers, and the sudden expansion of the dispensing power, facts that alienated Germany and England, throve naturally in this atmosphere ; and between the parallel and contemporaneous growth of the twin monarchies a close and constant connection prevails. From that last phase of mediaeval society to modern, there could be no evolution. But Mr. Creighton's second title is The Italian Princes. He describes the things that vary rather than the things that endure. We see the successive acts, the passing