In this Ideal Content of the House of Borgia, there is matter for a score of specialists. The present writer lays no claim to any special knowledge whatever; although his studies obviously have led him more in one direction than in another. Curbed by his limitations, he makes no pretensions to the discovery of new or striking facts: but he humbly trusts that he has been enabled to throw new and natural light on myths and legends, and to re-arrange causes and events in a humanly probable sequence. In dealing with circumstantial calumny, he has adopted an unworn system; _e.g._, in the case of persons said to have been raised to the purple in reward for criminal services. Here, he furnishes complete lists of the persons raised to the purple; and, when the names of those accused of crime do not appear therein, he takes the fact as direct and positive refutation of the calumny. Touching the matter of names and styles, he has made an attempt to correct the slipshod and corrupt translations of the same, which, at present, are the vogue. To allude to Personages in terms which are appropriate enough for one’s terrier, or for one’s slave; to speak of sovereigns as mere John, or of pontiffs as plain Paul; are breaches of etiquette of unpardonable grossness. The present writer has tried, at least, to accord to his characters the use of the names, and the courtesy of the styles that they actually bore. In his manner of writing, he has endeavoured to rush from mood to mood, in consonance with the subject under consideration, with something of the flippant breathless masterful versatility which Nature uses. For men were very natural in the Borgian Era. It is said that the style of a history should be grave and stately; and so it should be, when History is written in epic form. But to write of men and women,—human men and women,—on those inhuman lines, is nothing but an unnatural crime; and, also, as ridiculously incongruous and inconsistent, as it would be to sing the _Miserere mei Deus_ to the tune of the _Marseillaise_. For human nature is not at all times grave and stately; but has its dressing-gown-and-slipper periods,—being human nature. The aim of this work is to display the Borgia alive and picturesque and unconventional, as indeed they were; not monumentally to freeze them into ideally heroic moulds, or to chisel them into conventionally unrecognisable effigies. The writer does not write with the simple object of “white-washing” the House of Borgia; his present opinion being that all men are too vile for words to tell. Further, he does not write in the Roman Catholic interest; nor in the Jesuit interest; nor in the interest of any creed, or corporation, or even human being: but solely as one who has scratched together some sherds of knowledge, which he perforce must sell, to live.