should sit with his lord; and the just and proper favour I ask is permission for the servant to wait at the table of your Holiness.' The supper being thus served, and the moment arrived for giving the confections, the box having been poisoned by the steward as directed by the Pope, the Cardinal placed it before his Holiness, who, relying on his steward, and convinced of the Cardinal's sincerity by his service, ate joyfully of this box, as did the Cardinal of the other, which the Pontiff believed the poisoned one. Thereafter, at the hour when from its nature the poison took effect, his Holiness began to feel it, and thus he died: the Cardinal being still alarmed, took medicine and an emetic, and was easily cured." The death of Alexander by poison is generally credited, although Raynaldus and Muratori, willing to mitigate so heinous a scandal, incline to the few and obscure authorities who attribute it to tertian fever. It was natural that the truth should be glossed over, especially in despatches addressed to the court of his daughter Lucrezia, to which the latter annalist probably had access. But though the earliest intelligence of the event forwarded by the Venetian envoy alludes to the Pope's seizure as fever, his subsequent letters, quoted by Sanuto, thus loathsomely confirm the current suspicion of poison having been administered. "On this day [19th] I saw the Pontiff's corpse, whose apparel was not worth two ducats. He was swollen beyond the size of one of our large wine-skins. Never since the Christian era was a more horrible and terrible sight witnessed. The blood flowed from ears, mouth, and nose faster than it could be wiped away; his lips were larger than a man's fist, and in his open mouth the blood boiled as in a caldron on the fire, and kept incessantly flowing as from a spout; all which I report from observation."[9] [Footnote 9: This passage appears conclusive as to the fact of poison having been taken by the Pontiff; and it will be observed that Sanuto's story of the confection-boxes in no way accounts for the illness of Valentino, which is equally passed over in another totally different statement of this affair, given in the Appendix to Ranke's _History of the Popes_, section i. No. 4,--omissions to be kept in view in testing the probability of these conflicting accounts. Roscoe seems to have subsequently abandoned the doubts thrown upon the poisoning in his first edition, although ever prone to extenuate vices of the Borgia: witness his elaborate defence of Lucrezia, or his views as to the Duke of Gandia's murder and the massacre of Sinigaglia. Voltaire treats the question like a habitual doubter, with the ingenuity of a critic rather than the matured judgment of a historian. He is answered, with perhaps unnecessary detail, by Masse, to whom Sanuto was unknown.]