THE BANKERS AND BROKERS OF NEW YORK. The publisher of the "Merchants and Bankers Almanac," (23 Murray St., New York) has issued the fourth edition of the work for 1871, containing the names of 6,000 bankers in the United States and a revised list of all the bankers and brokers in New York City, including members of the New-York Stock Exchange, the "Gold Exchange," &c. Price $2.00.

PUBLISHED EVERY SATURDAY BY

LITTELL & GAY, BOSTON.

FOR EIGHT DOLLARS, remitted directly to the Publishers, the LIVING AGE will be punctually forwarded for a year, free of postage. But we do not prepay postage on less than a year, nor where we have to pay commission for forwarding the money.

Price of the First Series, in Cloth, 36 volumes, 90 dollars.

Any Volume Bound, 3 dollars; Unbound, 2 dollars. The sets, or volumes, will be sent at the expense of the publishers.

PREMIUMS FOR CLUBS.

For 5 new subscribers ($40.), a sixth copy; or a set of HORNE'S INTRODUCTION TO THE BIBLE, unabridged, in 4 large volumes, cloth, price $10; or any 5 of the back volumes of the LIVING AGE, in numbers, price $10.

Pope, and is diversified with antiquarian tended his father's swine as a child; howand curious studies of the state of Roman ever, he had an uncle, Frà Salvadore, in society, and of the topography of Rome the convent of the order of Minorite Friars during the fifteenth century; all which at Montalto, beyond the reach of the resubjects are so judiciously and artistically verse of fortune which assailed the rest of handled and arranged, that the two vol- his family; this Frà Salvadore undertook umes of text form very various, instructive, the education of his nephew, and got him and agreeable reading, and are a valuable entered into his own convent at the age of addition to sound historical literature. nine. The industry, vivacity of spirit, and Far more accurate than Leti or Tempesti and less sententious than Ranke, Baron Hübner appears to us to have contributed to the literature of Europe one of the most valuable productions of an age rich in historical biography. His style is vigorous, graphic, and perspicuous; and the reader is seldom, if ever, reminded that the author is writing in a language not his own. We regret that we have not been able to avail ourselves, for the purposes of this article, of the English translation of the work, from the pen of Mr. Hugh Jerningham; but our readers will shortly have an opportunity of becoming more fully acquainted with the results of Baron Hübner's labours in an English dress.

M. de Pisany, the ambassador of Henri III., who arrived in Rome while the conclave was still sitting which elected Sixtus V., announced to his master that "un cordelier nommé Montalto' was now Pope. Sixtus V. indeed began his ecclesiastical career as a friar. He was the son of poor parents. His father, Pier Gentile Peretti, was, when the future pope was born, on the 13th December, 1521, a gardener at a small village, Grottamare, near Montalto, about fifty miles south of Ancona, in a delightful neighbourhood with a fair prospect on the Adriatic. The family was of Sclavonic origin, and had escaped from Dalmatia and the terror of the Turkish invasion in the preceding century. The father of Felice Peretti, as the boy was called, had himself lost everything in the sack of Montalto in 1518, by the Duke of Urbino, after which he removed to Grottamare. Such was the straitened condition of the family, that the mother of the future Pope was obliged to enter domestic service; his aunt became a washerwoman; and it is said that his sister followed the same calling.

powers of acquirement of the boy-friar were soon remarkable. After going through courses of rhetoric, philosophy, and theology, in various convents and towns, he became already known as a preacher at nineteen, though he did not take the degree of doctor of theology till 1548. His fame as a preacher rapidly spread throughout Italy; but it was not till the year 1552 in Lent that he made his first essay in a pulpit in Rome at the church of the Santi Apostoli. As his reputation had preceded him, the audience was numerous and distinguished, and among them were to be seen Cardinal Carpi, his earliest benefactor, Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits, and Filippo Neri, now a saint in the Roman calendar. It would appear, however, from a fragment of a sermon to be found in Baron Hübner's volumes, that his style of oratory was of the kind which the French call amplificative, and rather abundant and ornate than of real moral and religious strength; and that it was mainly his animated gestures and fiery earnest look which made his eloquence impressive with his auditory. That, indeed, is the characteristic of Italian pulpit oratory. He had, however, such success, that his ecclesiastical good fortune dates from his first appearance in Rome, when his talents and character acquired the esteem of the leading members of the Church of Rome.

A great movement of reform was then going on in the bosom of Catholicism itself. The profligate, the voluptuous, and the art-loving popes and cardinals—the Borgias and the Medicis - were disappearing before the earnest zeal of the stern race who awoke anew the sleeping genius of the Church, and evoked afresh the spirit of Hildebrand and Innocent III. The Inquisitor-Pope was in the ascendant, for Loyola and Philip II. had sworn to undo The little Felice Peretti is said to have the work of Luther and Calvin. It was

from the society of such men as Cardinal tion of heresy as the highest of all human Caraffa, afterwards Paul IV., and Cardinal and divine duties. Pius V. conferred on Ghislieri, at that time chief inquisitor, his friend two successive bishoprics, and known later as Pius V., the most intolerant paved the way to the Papacy for him by and implacable of the new order of Popes, that the future Sixtus V. educated his fiery spirit to that pitch of zeal which made him the greatest pontiff of that age, in whom the spirit of persecution became incarnate, who undertook to war with heresy to the death, and to shut the gates of mercy on all mankind who would not adopt the decrees of the Council of Trent. With such powerful friends as Caraffa, Ghislieri, and Carpi, ecclesiastical promotion was a matter of course with Father Felice Peretti, or Montalto as he now began to be called. He was successively made regent of the convents of his order at Sienna, Naples, and Venice. At Venice he also received the appointment of Inquisitor: and in consequence of the rigorous zeal with which he supported all the pretensions of Rome in that city, he gained increased confidence with the champions of Papal authority, though he excited hostility among the citizens of the Republic.

creating him a cardinal in 1570, when he took the title of Cardinal Montalto, receiving from the Pope at the same time the pension of 100 crowns a month, known as "the dish of the poor cardinal." Up to the time of the election of Gregory XIII. he was an active adviser of Pius V., but during his long disgrace after the elevation of his enemy, he lost "the dish of the poor cardinal," and had to fall back for occupation on his passion for building, which he shared in a humbler way with the great Cardinal Farnese, and other members of the Sacred College. He built the villa on the Esquiline Hill, now called the Villa Massimi, but then the Villa Peretti, constructed on part of the site of the gardens of Mæcenas, and in front of the agger of Servius Tullius. He also built a tomb for Nicholas IV. and repaired the chapel del Presepio in Santa Maria Maggiore. To these occupations, and to the publication of a large edition of the After having filled various other offices, words of Saint Ambrose, who appears to he became vicar-general of his own Fran- have been his favourite father, and whose ciscan order, which he proceeded to re- bold defiance of Theodosius he constantly form with characteristic severity. Subse-quoted as a precedent for himself, he dequently he went on a mission to Spain voted his leisure before his advent to the in the suite of Cardinal Buoncompagni, pontificate. afterwards Gregory XIII., with whom however he quarrelled on the road in a way which left no room for reconciliation; so that he lived in forced retirement during the whole thirteen years of Gregory's pontificate, which immediately preceded his own. He revenged himself, however, during his retirement by bitter and frequent sarcasms on the government and character of Gregory, and when he himself became Pope, he never failed to contrast the vigour of his own pontificate with the weakness of that of his predecessor; he even had a dream, in which he saw the deceased Pope in the flames of purgatory.

Before he removed however to his new house on the Esquiline, a tragic event in his own family, strangely characteristic of the time, and of which the fatal beauty of the famous Vittoria Accoromboni was the cause, agitated all Rome and all Italy. A few years before, when he was named vicar-general of his order, he had brought his sister Donna Camilla and her family to Rome. The father of Vittoria Accoromboni, himself of noble family, was then in search of a husband for his daughter, whose manner, wit, speech, and grace fascinated all beholders, and brought forward many suitors for her hand. The chief of these was Paolo Giordano Orsini, Duke Pius V. was the chief benefactor of the of Bracciano, a man of terrible reputation, future Sixtus V.; there was much simi- who was suspected of having murdered larity of character between the two eccle- his first wife, daughter of the Grand Duke siastics, both were ardent, zealous, and of Tuscany, and whose houses and country austere, and both regarded the persecu-castles were mere strongholds of banditti.