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st be remembered the pope, of all living men, was of especial interest to the class who at that period were in the habit of writing. Such testimony as this, being the evidence of eye-witnesses, would be the highest testimony, and would settle the fact beyond dispute. Where is it? Silence profound is our only answer. Nothing of the kind is on the record of that period. Ah! then in that case we must suppose the matter to have been temporarily hushed up, and we will consent to receive accounts written ten, twenty--well, we'll not haggle about a score or two--or even fifty years later. Silence again! Not a scrap, not a solitary line can be found.
And so we travel through all the history which learning and industry have been able to rescue from the re-cords of the past down to the end of the ninth century, and find the same unbroken silence.
We must then go to the tenth century, where the murder will surely out. Silence again, deep and profound, through all the long years from 900 to 1000, and all is blank as before!
And now we again go on beyond another half-century, still void of all mention of Pope Joan, until we reach the year 1058, just two hundred and three years after the assigned Joanide.
Comparing the so-called statement of Marianus with the latest sensational and circumstantial relation, it is plain that the story did not, like Minerva, spring full-armed into life, but that it is the result of a long and gradual growth, fostered by the genius of a long series of inventive chroniclers.
But the testimony of the Marianus chronicle comes to still greater grief, And here a word of explanation. The Original MS. Of Marianus is not known to exist, but we have numerous copies of it, the respective ages of which are well ascertained. D?llinger mentions two of them well known in Germany to be the oldest in existence, in which not a word concerning the popess can be found. The copy in which it is found is of 1513, and the explanation as to its appearance there is simple. The passage in question was doubtless put in the margin by some reader or copyist, and by some later copyist inserted in the text, And so we return to the original dark silence in which we started.
To the year 1240 or 1250 may then be assigned, on the highest authority, the period when the Joan story first made its appearance in writing and in history--nearly four hundred years after its supposed date.
"Papa Pater Patrum papissae pandito partum, Et tibi tunc edam de corpore quando recedam."
Some chroniclers relate it differently, namely, that the pope undertook to exorcise a person possessed of an evil spirit, and on demanding of the devil when he would go out from the possessed person's body, the evil one replied in the Latin verses above given, that is to say, "O Pope! thou father of the fathers, declare the time of the pope's parturition, and I will then tell you when I will go out from this body."
The demon always was a fellow who had a keen eye for the fashions, and he appears to have indulged in alliterative Latin poetry precisely at the period when that sort of literary trifling was most in vogue among scholars who recreated themselves with such lines as
"Ruderibus rejectis Rufus Festus fieri fecit;"
"Roma Ruet Romuli Ferro Flammaque Fameque."
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