thither Pole retired when in need of rest, or, as in the middle of the Council of Trent, in search of health. Priuli was with him on his many legations; with him too at his palace of Lambeth during the two years that Pole was archbishop of Canterbury; and when Pole died, "Alvise Priuli, for twenty years my tried friend," was left his heir and executor. In spite of the joke about the horse, and his unwillingness to be drilled, Pole had the good sense to listen to Priuli's recommendations, and from his next letter, written to Contarini from Piacenza, it is clear that he has profited. "Again! another letter on the same subject! Do you think you have no weight with me that you must follow up the first by a second? But from this I learn how anxious all love must needs be. I cannot deny that my strength has greatly benefited by listening to your advice, and I am not only well, but even in robust health. We stop here a whole day, a thing I have never done before upon the journey. I am left alone in the house, as my people have all gone out to see the town. So I take up my pen once more that I may spend the time with you." It was partly his delicate health, partly his poverty-for all his English fortune had been confiscated-partly, too, a constitutional shyness and shrinking from publicity, which made Pole dislike and avoid these official journeys. He came only too willingly to the lure of Sadoleto's gardens at Carpentras, and loudly bewailed the hardship which compelled him to quit them for a journey into France. And, later on, he writes as legate from Viterbo to Contarini, explaining how he likes to live: "I use my morning hours in study, and

am therefore very jealous of them. Business comes after dinner, and the rest of the day is devoted to the company of Messer Carnesechi and Antonio Flaminio. If only you were here this place would be a paradise on earth. Your absence is the sole drawback to my complete satisfaction. But were I to judge from my past experience of the way in which God has ordered my goings, I should have reason to doubt whether this full measure of quiet could be mine for long." It is only in the company of a friend or of a friend's volume that he can forget the tedium of the road. "Your book," he writes to Sadoleto, "was carriage, and springs, and companion to me, so much did it ease my journey." Pole never could see a monastery without wishing to seek rest inside its walls; he constantly speaks of himself as though he were a hunted deer running for the shelter of a cloister, be it at Dilingen, at Carpentras, or at Maguzano on the Lake of Garda. He is happy when he escapes from Rome to the country; he is happy at Viterbo in the company of Flaminio, the poet of the country; or at Rovellena, among the Euganean hills, “our paradise, as I can truly call this place, both because of the charm of its situation amid these delicious hills, and also and much more because of the friends whose society I here enjoy;” happy, too, at Dandolo's villa, “ubi jucunde et hilare epulati sumus.”" Pole was made for the frank enjoyment and companionship of his friends in all the quiet and refined conditions of life, but not for the bustle and self-assertion of the great world. Whether it was the poverty of his health, or that the tragedy of his house was ever present to his memory,

this instinctive shrinking accompanied him through life. It showed itself in his refusal of the cardinalate, a refusal which compelled the pope to take him, as it were, by surprise, first appearing to consent, and then, on the morning of the Consistory, causing him to be tonsured, consecrated, and declared a cardinal before he well knew what had happened to him. It showed itself later on, when he declined to urge his candidature for the tiara; and in the indifference with which he learned that he had missed it by a single vote, an indifference that irritated a member of the Sacred College into calling him un pezzo di legno to his face. But Pole was not wooden in insensibility; he had his objects of desire. He longed, as most men do, for what he never did possess, quiet and the enjoyment of his friends. Caraffa pursued him as he pursued all who belonged to Contarini and the party of conciliation. Pole missed the pain of seeing England break with his Church once more. He and Queen Mary died in 1548, on the same day; but Pole closed his career under a cloud of suspicion at Rome, deprived of his office as legate, and threatened in his See; the youngest, the gentlest, and the most unfortunate in this trio of Contarini and his friends.

These three men differed widely from one another; though chance threw them together in a close and beautiful intimacy. The happiest of Pole's days were passed in Italy. There, in contact with the friends. he had made, his character is at its brightest and its best. Pole's Italian sojourn, however, is no more than an episode in his story. His real life centres in Eng

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land. There he experienced the misfortunes of his youth; and there the dark story of the persecutions from Canterbury gathers about his last years. In England he was called on to face the crucial trials of his career. Sadoleto's life could hardly have had a different issue. He was a scholar and a recluse by nature, and the difficulties of the times made his high station a certain source of unhappiness. Yet among these three friends Sadoleto's character presents the greatest harmony and completeness. For Contarini the problem was rather different. He was endowed

with a burning activity of temper, and a natural bias in two directions, towards philosophical study and towards politics. The fact that he was a Venetian determined him rather as a man of action than as a speculator. But, having adopted the career of politics, his philosophical bias avenged itself and compelled him to pursue a line of compromise. Such a line was an impossible one, and doomed to failure between Luther, Caraffa, Charles, and Francis. Had he not been a philosopher Contarini might have been a politician of the type of Caraffa; had he been less of a politician he might have been a speculator in the school of Pomponazzo, and a possible precursor of Bruno. Through his intellectual sympathies he felt the tumult and the doubt of this period of change, and his sleepless nights are witness to the questionings of his soul. The interest of his life and the pathos of his failure lay in this, that he was at once something more and something less than a politician or a philosopher. He reflected faithfully the period of transition and the complexity of his own day.

MARCANTONIO BRAGADIN, A SIXTEENTH-CENTURY CAGLIOSTRO.

I.

ONE of the most curious and permanent features in the history of the human spirit is the perennial expectation that the impossible may be realized. The human spirit, like a child with its toys, seems to grow weary of that which it possesses, and to reach out its hands to that which it has not. The very improbability of attaining an object throws a fascination around it, and renders it more attractive than that which lies under our hand. Mankind never ceases to hope-often in secret—that the picture of his imagination may become actual for him in some way or other. The form which this expectation assumes continually varies. Now its result is a credence in oracles; now a conviction that the millennium is imminent; now the philosopher's stone or El Dorado attracts desire; now it is the prospect of classifying ghosts or of reading the secret behind the veil. But, however various the manifestations of this reaching towards the unrealized may be, each age, and especially each age of any remarkable vitality, has shown itself aoristic, undefined, and formless in some direction.