_Mi sembra che la storia si sia servita della famiglia Borgia come di tela sopra la quale abbia voluto dipingere le sfenatezze dei secoli XV, XVI._ “It appears to me that history has made the House of Borgia to serve as a canvas whereon to depict the unbridled licence of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries.” (_Ragguali, sulla vita di Marino Sanuto, 207, note._) By some historians, the Borgia women are delineated as “poison-bearing maenads,” or “veneficous bacchantes”; the Borgia men as monsters utterly flagitious: both men and women of a wickedness perfectly impossible to human nature, perfectly improbable even in nature kakodaimoniacal. By other historians, chiefly, strange to say, of the French School, and afflicted with the modern itch for rehabilitation, the identical Borgia are displayed in the character of stainless innocents who shine in the light of inconceivable virtue. No man, save One, since Adam, has been wholly good. Not one has been wholly bad. The truth about the Borgia, no doubt, lies between the two extremes. They are accused of loose morals, and of having been addicted to improper practices and amusements. Well; what then? Does anybody want to judge them? Popes, and kings, and lovers, and men of intellect, and men of war cannot be judged by the narrow code, the stunted standard, of the journalist and the lodging-house keeper, or the plumber and the haberdasher. So indecently unjust a suggestion only could emanate from persons who expect to gain in comparison. Why should good hours of sunlight be wasted on the judgment seat, by those who, presently, will have to take their turn in the dock? Why not leave the affairs of Borgia to the Recording Angel? All about the Borgia quite truly will be known, some day; and, in the interim, more profitable entertainment may be gained by frankly and openly studying that swift vivid violent age, when “the Pope was an Italian Despot with sundry sacerdotal additions;” when “what Mill, in his Essay on Liberty, desired,—what seems every day more unattainable in modern life,—was enjoyed by the Italians; _there was no check to the growth of personality, no grinding of men down to match the average_.” “Amorist, agonist, man, that, incessantly toiling and striving, “Snatches the glory of life only from love and from war— that is the formula in which the Borgia best may find expression. For they, also, were human beings, who were born, struggled through life, and died. * * * * *