Meantime, Innocent VIII. died; and in August of the same year, 1492, the Sacred College announced "_Urbi et Orbi_" that they had been inspired by the Holy Spirit to elect as Heaven's Vicegerent on earth, the Cardinal Roderigo Borgia; one, who may be safely assumed, without any careful scanning of the members of the college, to have been the worst of those offered to their choice, inasmuch as history has assigned to him the portentous pre-eminence of being the worst of the successors of St. Peter. English readers have no idea what this Pope, Alexander VI., was; and no English page can dare to tell them. Studious men, who feel, that, inasmuch as despite all change of time and circumstance, similar causes will, in the moral world as certainly as in the physical world, produce similar effects, it is therefore fitting that such cesspools of abominations should be sounded by those who for the sake of the general health ought to be conversant with every form of disease,—these may in the cynical unblushing dead Latin of Burckhardt the diarist, look on the loathsome picture of life in the Vatican under this Father of Christendom. For others let it suffice, that this man, chosen by the Church by infallible inspiration, for the infallible guidance of Christian souls, was such, that no human soul could be in communication with his without deep injury and degradation. [Sidenote: ALEXANDER VI.] This man, as Cardinal under Sixtus IV., had been his vice-chancellor, and a steady adherent of the Riarii. He was the sponsor chosen by the young Count and Countess to hold at the font their first-born son. And the friendship which existed, and was thus specially marked, between them and such a man as the Cardinal Borgia, cannot but be felt to have the force of unfavourable evidence in our estimate of them.