Note 58 — Chapter XXII

What are we to make of the words of Fregoso (as preserved by Bembo)—an archbishop who, in describing to the Pope his uncle's death, mentions his partaking of the last sacraments from the Bishop of Fossombrone, in these terms, "Quiquidem Deos illi superos atque manes placavit"? Such idioms will not bear retranslation. The expression employed by Castiglione, though tinged with the cold formality of classicism, is less startling: "Ut ungeretur more sanctæ matris ecclesiæ rogavit." But a pagan taint may often be sadly traced upon the devotion of this age. In the first volume of Vaissieux's Archivio Storico d'Italia, the last hours of a convict, condemned at Florence in 1500, are thus narrated by an eye-witness:—Pietro Paolo Boscoli, a political reformer of the school of Savonarola, thirsted in his dying moments after the living waters of evangelical truth, and sought some better solace than the cold formalities of an ordinary viaticum. Refusing to be shriven by any but a friar of St. Mark's, he adjured an attendant friend to aid in getting Brutus out of his head, in order that he might make a Christian end. Nor was this heterodoxy exclusively Italian. Cervantes, in a recently recovered fragment, El Buscapié, says, "I dislike to see the graceful and pious language befitting the Christian muse mingled with the profane phraseology of heathenism. Who can be otherwise than displeased to find the name of God, of the Holy Virgin, and of the Prophets, in conjunction with those of Apollo and Daphne, Pan and Syrinx, Jupiter and Europa, Vulcan, Cupid, Venus, and Mars?"—Bentley's Mag., XXIV., p. 203.