Well convinced of the reality of the impossibility alleged, that any human being should pass suddenly from such a moral state as that indicated to our judgments by the facts of Lucrezia's early career, to such an ethical condition as that presumed to accompany her later life, while he in no wise seeks to invalidate the historical evidence of the case, he will yet deny such change to have been accomplished. Knowing how large a portion of the spiritual deterioration arising from any outward acts, is dependent on the degree to which the conscience of the agent is enlightened, he will deny that Lucrezia's moral state during the first part of her life was such as we are apt to conceive that it needs must have been. Aware how very much of the difficulty of turning from evil to good, consists in the arduousness of the struggle to rise from infamy to good repute, he will assert, that Lucrezia could not have been sunk in that depth of infamy to which we suppose that the admitted facts of her conduct must necessarily have consigned her. For the moralist there will be nothing new or striking in all this. The interesting significance of the phenomenon is for the historian. That restoration and _rehabilitation_, it would appear, which would be impossible in the nineteenth, was possible in the fifteenth century. The gulf which would now be wholly impassable, did not then yawn so wide as to make crossing it impossible. Here is to be found the explanation, and herein consists the historical interest of the facts of the case. The finely organised moral sense of the nineteenth century would have been wholly killed by similar wounds, and the spiritual destruction of the individual would have been irretrievable. But the lower, coarser, more rudimentary moral sense of the "ages of faith" was not wholly killed by such injuries. And the extraordinary social phenomenon of the marriage is only explicable in the same manner. The moral reprobation, which among us would doom such an offender to the isolation of a leper, did not exist in that age and country. When the aged Pontiff Paul III. characterised the even more horrible atrocities of his son Piero Luigi Farnese as juvenile indiscretions, though the respectable world of the sixteenth century was revolted, the discrepancy between the moral judgment of Heaven's vicegerent and that of his faithful people, was very far from being as monstrous as that between his and our nineteenth century English feeling. The career of Lucrezia was also doubtless deemed highly reprehensible by her contemporaries. Indeed we find it made the subject of invective and epigram. But it is clear, that none of the horror and the loathing attached to it with which we now regard it. It is evident that she was not deemed hopelessly and irrecoverably soiled and destroyed by it.