_Query put to a Pope._--
"Sancte Pater! scire vellem
Si Papatus mutat pellem?"
I have been told that these lines were addressed to one of the popes,
whose life, before his elevation to the see of St. Peter, had been
passed in excesses but little suited to the clerical profession.
They were addressed to him _orally_, by one of his former associates,
who met and stopped him while on his way to or from some high festival
of the Church, and who plucked aside, as he spoke, the gorgeous robes in
which his quondam fellow-reveller was dressed.
The reply of the pope was prompt, and, like the question, in a rhyming
Latin couplet. I wish, if possible, to discover, the name of the
pope;--the terms of his reply;--the name of the bold man who "_put him
to the question_;"--by what writer the anecdote is recorded, or on what
authority it rests.