Princes and pontiffs trembled at the freedom of his apostolical censures; France, England, and Milan consulted and obeyed his judgment in a schism of the Church; the debt was repaid by the gratitude of Innocent II; and his successor, Eugenius III, was the friend and disciple of the holy St. Bernard.

Among the rest, it was the fortune of EUGENIUS, CRITES, LISIDEIUS and NEANDER to be in company together: three of them persons whom their Wit and Quality have made known to all the Town; and whom I have chosen to hide under these borrowed names, that they may not suffer by so ill a Relation as I am going to make, of their discourse.

" "In my opinion" replied EUGENIUS, "you pursue your point too far!

" "If your quarrel," said EUGENIUS, "to those who now write, be grounded only upon your reverence to Antiquity; there is no man more ready to adore those great Greeks and Romans than I am: but, on the other side, I cannot think so contemptibly of the Age I live in, or so dishonourably of my own Country as not to judge

EUGENIUS was going to continue this discourse, when LISIDEIUS told him, that "it was necessary, before they proceeded further, to take a Standing Measure of their controversy.

"If confidence presage a victory; EUGENIUS, in his own opinion, has already triumphed over the Ancients.

"But since I have otherwise a great veneration for him, and you, EUGENIUS!

" CRITES had no sooner left speaking; but EUGENIUS, who waited with some impatience for it, thus began: "I have observed in your speech, that the former part of it is convincing, as to what the Moderns have profited by the Rules of the Ancients: but, in the latter, you are careful to conceal, how much they have excelled them.

" EUGENIUS was proceeding in that part of his discourse, when CRITES interrupted him.

"I see," said he, "EUGENIUS and I are never likely to have this question decided betwixt us: for he maintains the Moderns have acquired a new perfection in writing; I only grant, they have altered the mode of it.

"So, in their Love Scenes, of which EUGENIUS spoke last, the Ancients were more hearty; we, the more talkative.

"And I will grant thus much to EUGENIUS, that, perhaps, one of their Poets, had he lived in our Age, "Si foret hoc nostrum fato delupsus in aevum, "as HORACE says of LUCILIUS, he had altered many things: not that they were not natural before; but that he might accommodate himself to the Age he lived in.

" This moderation of CRITES, as it was pleasing to all the company, so it put an end to that dispute: which EUGENIUS, who seemed to have the better of the argument, would urge no further.

But LISIDEIUS, after he had acknowledged himself of EUGENIUS his opinion, concerning the Ancients; yet told him, "He had forborne till his discourse was ended, to ask him, Why he preferred the English Plays above those of other nations?

and whether we ought not to submit our Stage to the exactness of our next neighbours?" "Though," said EUGENIUS, "I am, at all times, ready to defend the honour of my country against the French; and to maintain, we are as well able to vanquish them with our pens, as our ancestors have been with their swords:

He lived to see his dome finished and the cathedral consecrated by Pope Eugenius IV in 1436, dying ten years later.

The Emperor resided in the Peruzzi palace, now no more, near S. Croce; the Patriarch of Constantinople lodged (and as it chanced, died, for he was very old) at the Ferrantini palace, now the Casa Vernaccia, in the Borgo Pinti; while Pope Eugenius was at the convent attached to S. Maria Novella.

In the year 1439, as chapter II related, through the instrumentality of Cosimo a great episcopal Council was held at Florence, at which John Palaeologus, Emperor of the East, met Pope Eugenius IV.

In support of his refusal he claimed the intervention of Pope Eugenius III.

"He consented to accept," says his biographer, "only when he was at last forced to it by Pope Eugenius, who was present at the king's departure, and whom it was neither permissible nor possible for him to resist."

"We be fallen upon very grievous times," he wrote to Pope Eugenius III.; "the Lord, provoked by our sins, seemeth in some sort to have determined to judge the world before the time, and to judge it, doubtless, according to His equity, but not remembering His mercy.

In 1145 St. Bernard, in all the lustre of his name and influence, undertook, in concert with Cardinal Alberic, legate of the Pope Eugenius III., to go and preach against the heretics in the countship of Toulouse.

"Aeneas Sylvius," say they, "after giving a very circumstantial account of one contested with great obstinacy by a great and small species on the trunk of a pear tree," adds that "'This action was fought in the pontificate of Eugenius the Fourth, in the presence of Nicholas Pistoriensis, an eminent lawyer, who related the whole history of the battle with the greatest fidelity.'

EUGENIUS, the name of four Popes.

EUGENIUS IV., Pope, born at Venice; his pontificate was marked by a schism created by proceedings in the Council of Basel towards the reform of the Church and the limitation of the papal authority, the issue of which was that he excommunicated the Council and the Council deposed him; he had an unhappy time of it, and in his old age regretted he had ever left his monastery to assume the papal crown.