Of Alexander VI. the private life is well known; the nature of our subject will excuse us from pursuing the details which compose it, of, robbery, perjury, revelings, sacrilege, obscenity, incest, poisoning, and assassination. Our business is with his politics not his manners. He persuaded Charles VIII. to pass into Italy, for the purpose of conquering Naples; and, while Charles was preparing for it, Alexander entered into negociations with every court, even that of the Sultan, to raise up enemies to France. His writing to Bajazet II. that Charles menaced Naples but in order to fall on the Ottoman empire; his delivering Prince Zizim, the brother of Bajazet, to Charles, by order of the Sultan, but delivering him up poisoned, and receiving from the latter the price of his crime: such were, in his political career, the feats of Alexander VI. Yet this did not prevent his holiness from concluding a treaty of alliance with Charles, and almost immediately after leaguing with the Venetians and the Emperor Maximilian against the same Charles, whose greatest error was, opposing the designs of eighteen cardinals who, already wearied with the excesses of Alexander, resolved to depose him. The pope had a daughter named Lucretia, and four sons, of whom one named Geoffrey remains almost unknown; another obtained from the King of Naples the title of Squillace; another became celebrated under the name of Cesar Borgia; and the eldest was Duke of Gandia and Benevenlum. To advance Cesar, who was only a cardinal, Charles VIII. was promised support in a second expedition of the French into Italy: Charles died before it could be undertaken, and Frederick, king of Naples, was then resorted to. This prince was required to give his daughter in marriage to Cesar, who should be created prince of Tarentum: Frederick having rejected this proposal, it was necessary to recur a third time to the French, then governed by Louis XII. Cesar arrived in France: he took with him a bull which authorised Louis to part with his first wife; and he instigated him to conquer Naples and Milan: Naples, which from the time of Charles of Anjou, had not ceased to belong to a French prince; Milan, where Louis was to recover the rights he derived from Valentine Visconti, his grandmother: and, to prevent his being over-ruled by wiser counsels, his minister, cardinal Amboise, was seduced with the hope of being one day the successor of Alexander VI. Behold here, how the best of kings, having become the ally of the most perfidious of pontiffs, engages in a dangerous war, in which the treacheries of Rome snatch from the French the fruits of their victories. But the Cardinal Cesar becomes Duke of Valentinois; the family of Borgia triumphs over its enemies, and enriches itself with their spoils; in fine, Alexander VI. became the first potentate in Europe, when a drug which he had prepared for others terminated, by a happy mistake, his abominable pontificate.