She did not like the Cardinal, it is true; but she did not confound the ambassador with him who sent the embassy.

The Cardinal was a most courteous and accomplished man of the world, and Corona could not easily have explained the aversion she felt for him.

It is very likely that if she could have understood the part he was sustaining in the great European struggle of those days, she would have accorded him at least the admiration he deserved as a statesman.

He had his faults, and they were faults little becoming a cardinal of the Holy Roman Church.

But few are willing to consider that, though a cardinal, he was not a priest--that he was practically a layman who, by his own unaided genius, had attained to great power, and that those faults which have been charged against him with such virulence would have passed, nay, actually pass, unnoticed and uncensured in many a great statesman of those days and of these.