Leo died in 1521. His death was sudden, and not without suspicion of
poison. It was said that the last offices of the Church were not
performed for the dying man, and an epigram sharply embodied the
report. "Do you ask why at his last hour Leo could not take the sacred
things? He had sold them."

"Sacra sub extremâ, si forte requiritis, horâ
Cur Leo non potuit sumere: Vendiderat."

The spirit of Luther had penetrated through the walls of Rome; and
though all tongues but those of statues might be silenced, eyes were
not blinded, nor could ears be made deaf. Nowhere was the need of
reform so felt as at Rome, but nowhere was there so little hope for
it; for the people stood in equal need of it with the Church, whose
ministers had corrupted them, and whose rulers tyrannized over them.
"Farewell, Rome!" said Pasquin.

"Roma, vale! Satis est vidisse. Revertar
Quum leno, meretrix, scurra, cinaedus ero."

When Leo's short-lived successor, the gloomy Fleming, Adrian VI., who
was the author of the proposal to destroy Pasquin, despatched his
nuncio to the diet of Nuremberg to oppose the progress of Luther, he
told him in his instructions to "avow frankly that God has permitted
this schism and this persecution on account of the sins of men, and,
above all, of those of the priests and the prelates of the Church."
Pasquin could not have improved on these words. And when, twenty
months after his elevation to the papacy, this hard old man died, the
inscription--which he ordered to be put upon his tomb was in words fit