Page:Historical Essays and Studies.djvu/78

66 new investigations. The last traveller over the ground is Gregorovius.

The seventh volume of his History of Mediæval Rome virtually completes his task, for it reaches the beginning of the sixteenth century. Another volume will include the age of Leo X. and terminate with the siege and devastation of the city in 1527. The work gains in breadth and variety as it proceeds, and at times it is little less than a history of the Popes. The treatment is unequal. Pius II., the ablest and most interesting pontiff of the fifteenth century, receives but little attention, probably because a voluminous life of him appeared only a few years ago. But the pontificate of Alexander VI. is described with elaborate care, and occupies great part of the volume. These chapters are amongst the best and most solid that Gregorovius has written. Continuous reports by the envoys of Florence, Venice, and Ferrara at the court of Rome enable him to emancipate himself from the trivial diarists on whom every writer since Raynaldus has been obliged to depend for the secret history of the Vatican. He is so well supplied with unpublished documents, and he employs them with so little regard for purposes of vulgar controversy, that his estimate of Alexander, which contradicts the unanimous judgment of all the contemporaries of the Pope, cannot be put aside at once, and without examination, amongst historical paradoxes. Alexander VI. is described by his latest historian as a man whose everyday mediocrity reflects the sinfulness of a godless age, whose motives were the love of pleasure and the advancement of his family, who had neither political capacity nor serious design, and whose nature was too frivolous and too passive even for ambition.

This excessive depreciation of a man whose talents and success were the admiration of Europe in his time is