The Lord Alexander P.P. VI was a very great man; guilty of hiding none of his human weakness: and on this account a Terror to hypocrites of all ensuing ages. Nothing in the world is so unpleasant, so disconcerting, so utterly abhorred, as the plain and naked truth. * * * * * After the spoliation of the Houses of Colonna and Savelli—an act which reduced them from that of premier barons of the Holy See to a position of such insignificance that they no more appear in the history of this pontificate,—the Pope’s Holiness married Madonna Lucrezia Borgia to Don Alfonso d’Este, the heir of Duke Ercole of Ferrara. This was after her year of widowhood. She was now the wife of royalty, with a near prospect of a throne, worshipped by the poor for her boundless and sympathetic charity, by the learned for her intelligence, by her kin for her loving loyalty, by her husband for her perfect wifehood and motherhood, by all for her transcendent beauty and her spotless name. Why it has pleased modern writers and painters to depict this pearl among women as a “poison-bearing maenad” a “veneficous bacchante” stained with revolting and unnatural turpitude, is one of those riddles to which there is no key. If physiognomy be an index to character, the most superficial inspection of the effigy of Madonna Lucrezia Borgia must put her calumniators to endless shame. In that simple profile, of features clean-cut, delicate, refined; in those chaste contours so gently rounded, so sweetly fresh and feminine; in the carriage of that flavian head well-poised and nobly frank, there can lurk no taint of decadent degeneracy. In the Ambrosian Library at Milan, is a long tress of her beautiful yellow hair, shining and pale; with her scholarly letters to a learned poet and cardinal the Lord Pietro Bembo, who had dedicated to her a genial Dialogue on platonics in Italian; an Elegy in Latin, in praise of her singing and recitation, “_quicquid agis, quicquid loqueris, delectat: et omnes “praecedunt Charites, subsequiturque decor_; with an Epigram on a gold serpent bracelet that she wore, ARMILLA AUREA LUCRETIAE BORGIAE FERRARIAE DUCIS IN SERPENTIS EFFIGIEM FORMATA “_Dypsas eram: sum facta, Tago dum perluor, aurum “tortile nympharum manibus decus; at memor dim “Eridani, auditaque tua Lucretia forma, “Eliadum ne te caperent electra tuarum, “gestandum carae fluvius transmisit alumnae._”