"The pontificate of Leo was the most gay and the most happy that Rome ever saw," says the chronicler. "Being much enamoured of building he took up with a great soul the making of San Pietro, which Julius, with marvellous art, had begun. He ennobled the palace of the Vatican with triple porticoes, ample and long, of the most beautiful fabrication, with gilded roofs and ornamented by excellent pictures. He rebuilt almost from the foundations the church of our Lady of the Monte Cœlio, from which he had his title as cardinal, and adorned it with mosaics. Finally there was nothing which during all his life he had more at heart or more ardently desired than the excellent name of liberal, although it was the wont ordinarily of all the others to turn their backs upon that virtue of liberality, and to keep far from it. He judged those unworthy of high station who did not with large and benign hand disperse the gifts of fortune, and above all those which were acquired by little or no fatigue. But while he in this guise governed Rome, and all Italy enjoyed a gladsome peace, he was by a too early death taken from this world although still in the flower and height of his years."
He died forty-five years old on December 1, 1521.
The great works which one and another of the Popes thus left half done were completed—St. Peter's by Sixtus V. 1590, and Paul V. 1615. The Last Judgment completing the Sistine chapel was finished by Michael Angelo in 1541 under Clement VII. and Paul III. And thus the Rome of our days—the Rome which not as pilgrims, but as persons living according to the fashion of our own times, which compels us to go to and fro over all the earth and see whatever is to be seen, we visit every year in large numbers—was left more or less as it is now, for the admiration of the world. Much has been done since, and is doing still every day to make more intelligible and more evident the memorials of an inexhaustible antiquity—but in the Rome of the Popes, the Rome of Christendom, History has had but little and Art not another word to say.
THE END.