Italy had awakened from the long slumber of the Middle Ages, during which her intellect had been paralysed by the superstitions and terrors inculcated by an ignorant and mercenary priesthood. She was emerging from the gloom into the new life which manifested itself, not only in the revival of learning and the prodigious blossoming of the fine arts, but also in the expansion of the human personality. Man had again discovered himself; he had become conscious of his faculties; he had found that he possessed a will that could carry him on to greatness in many fields of human activity. Hitherto superstitious, ignorant, and bigoted, he had been taught that if he ventured to use the intellect with which he had been endowed he would be eternally damned. Life to him was merely a painful pilgrimage between two eternities, through one of which he would be doomed to hell fire if in his mundane existence he dared to find any of the joy of living. Finally some perspicacious souls began to doubt, and in the teachings of the newly discovered heathen philosophy they found a theory of life more humane, more natural, more charitable. The arts had been entirely occupied with sacred subjects because in the Middle Ages the Church was their only patron. The gloom and superstition of mediaeval Christianity oppressed men’s souls, consequently the subjects selected were hideous and lugubrious in the extreme--emaciated saints, representations of the Last Judgment, human beings writhing in the torment of eternal wrath. The Almighty was not a god of pity and love, but one of vengeance. The teaching of the Nazarene was entirely distorted, just as it was by the Presbyterian divines in Scotland in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when they proclaimed their mission to be “to thunder out the Lord’s wrath and to curse,” and endeavoured to frighten their hearers into the paths of virtue with horrible tales of men “scorched in hell-fire,” in “boiling oil, burning brimstone, scalding lead,” sufficiently summarised in one of Binning’s sermons: “You shall go out of one hell into a worse; eternity is the measure of its continuance, and the degrees of itself are answerable to its duration.” Such, according to the Scotch pastors, was the measure of God’s love. Extremes, however, lead to revolution. A period of great asceticism is always followed by an era of licentiousness, and in Italy this era was synchronous with the age of the Borgias. It is no part of the present writer’s purpose to palliate the crimes of the Borgia; recent attempts which have been made to show that Alexander VI. and his son Caesar were gentle and impeccable beings, maligned and slandered, are inspired chiefly by a love of paradox, or occasioned by a motive not unlike that which actuates the great criminal lawyer whose chief victories consist in securing, not the acquittal of the innocent but of the guilty. These efforts, therefore, should not be taken too seriously.