buried in the church of S. Maria del Popolo. Her funeral was attended with almost the same pomp as that of a cardinal, and Leo the Tenth sent his chamberlain to do honor to her obsequies. A splendid tomb, bearing a lying inscription, was erected over her remains; but hate or shame, in after years, destroyed her monument, and left not a trace of inscription or of sarcophagus. The masses for which she had paid in advance, to purchase heaven, were read for two hundred years, but were at last stopped by the Church; less, perhaps, from the belief that enough had been done for the repose of the soul of Vanozza, than from a dread of modern criticism. She was a woman whose life contained many memories, and who knew much of the interior of the Vatican. She was also Lucrezia's earliest link to life.

Under Leo the Tenth Don Michellotto, Cæsar's old captain, was examined under torture, in S. Angelo, touching his complicity with Cæsar in the murders of Gandia, of Alfonso of Aragon, of Varano of Camerino, of Astorre and Ottaviano Manfredi, of Bernardino of Sermoneta, of the Bishop of Cagli, and of many another victim. He confessed under the second application of the rack, and "dixe che Papa Alessandro fu quello che fece ammazzare Don Alfonso, marito che fu della Ducessa. This confession was reported forthwith to Ferrara.

On the 14th of June, 1519, Lucrezia was confined of a still-born daughter. It soon became evident that the illness consequent upon this confinement would prove fatal, and the Duchess prepared to pay the debt of nature. As a woman she had good grounds for a just estimate of Popes, but as a Catholic she desired the Papal benediction; and she wrote, describing herself as a sinner, to Leo the Tenth, for his blessing before death. On the night of the 24th of June she died. Her husband was present, and showed grief for the loss of his valuable ally and life companion of so many years. Alfonso survived Lucrezia fifteen years. He died on the 31st of October, 1534.

We have now run through a necessarily very condensed narrative of the Borgia triumvirate, and I must devote a

few final words to the examination of the arguments of those who, like Herr Gregorovius, contend that Lucrezia Borgia is a much maligned woman; and that the general historical conception, both of contemporaries and of later writers, is essentially ungenerous and unjust. There is a full consentience of contemporary historical witnesses relative to even the darkest guilt which loads with infamy the memory of Lucrezia Borgia. The attackers are Guicciardini, Macchiavelli (who is explicit touching the relations between his hero Cæsar and Lucrezia), Sannazaro, Pontanus, Matarazzo, Priuli, Petrus Martyr, Marcus Attilius Alexius, while from among the ranks of the olden assailants rises the towering crest of the great modern Gibbon.

The defenders are Herr Gregorovius, Mr. W. Gilbert, Roscoe, and the Marchese Campori, who is the author of "Una Vittima della Storia." There are some minor admirers or whitewashers, as Monsignor Antonelli, Giovanni Zuchetti, Domenico Cerri, Bernardo Gatti; but this latter list comprises no writer of special mark or importance.

In order to narrow the field of inquiry, it may at once be remarked that the assailants all refer their gravest charges to the Roman period of Lucrezia's life. The defenders are fond of dwelling upon the Ferrara time, and argue that a woman who could live so well in Ferrara could not have been guilty of such evil as is charged against her in Rome.

The leading tenets of the defenders

are:

1. That such heinous crime as is charged against Lucrezia Borgia is in itself a thing incredible.

2. That a woman so lovely and so charming as she admittedly was could not have been guilty.

3. That the life in Ferrara contradicts the life which she is said to have led in Rome.

It is worth while to examine this defence in detail.

Contemporary poets were, in the Ferrara time, her panegyrists and flatterers; but no contemporary historian omits to mention, with all the calmness of conviction, the leading criminal charges against Lucrezia.

The defenders cannot proceed by way of rebutting or shaking evidence. They can only refuse to give credence to it, and allege sentimentally that it should not be believed. As the true colors on a frescoed wall are obscured and hidden by a layer of whitewash, they seek to cover over evidence which they cannot refute.

Gregorovius maintains that the moral sense is outraged by believing the historical evidence against Lucrezia; but surely the moral sense exceeds its province when it assuages its disgust by ignoring evidence, or by tampering with It is right that certain facts should revolt the moral sense; but it is not moral to find an escape for the mind by denying or disguising facts. The question is one of fact, not whether the facts are pretty. The history of the Renaissance in Italy is in itself a large fact which contains a great deal that must revolt the moral sense.

The chief and most revolting crime of the Borgias was not unknown, was not even quite singular, in the Italy of their day. It is not necessary to grope long amongst Italian literature of the day, for instances in the plural of incest; it will be sufficient to cite one example. Macchiavelli ("Discorsi," i. 27), when чe blames Giampolo Baglione, of Perugia for not having acquired eternal glory by murdering the Pope, Julius the Second, who had rashly ventured, with but a small escort, into the city which Giampolo held with a large force, says that such cowardice is the more surprising because Giampolo was a fine villain, who had murdered all the relations who stood in his way, and who was then living with his sister as his mistress

usava con la sorella." The case of the Cenci is awfully notorious.

All the interesting documents discovered by the German historian contain no refutation or rebutment of the contemporary historians. That broad current of human knowledge and belief upon which the record of the chronicler is partly based remains entirely unchecked by Gregorovius's researches. For evidence we must go back to the original sources, and out of the old materials we have to construct our conception of a character at once so fair and so dark.

Roscoe says, writing in that weak and

balanced style which is a result of the tendency of historians of his day to imitate Hume, "We may be allowed to conclude that it is scarcely possible, consistently with the known laws of moral character, that the flagitious and abominable Lucretia Borgia, and the respectable and honored Duchess of Ferrara, could be united in the same person." He shows here, as I contend, a want of constructive imagination, or imaginative insight. The commonly known "laws of moral character" do not apply to the Borgias, who were the moral phenomena that they were in consequence of standing outside ordinary laws, and being capable of any atrocity while maintaining serenity and retaining mental capacity. Lucrezia's policy in Ferrara was clear, and her adherence to what was politic is a note or sign of her undoubted capacity. Her position in Ferrara, especially after the death of her father, was one of entire dependence upon the good-will and benevolence of the house of Este, and of her husband. Alfonso, who had never loved his wife, and who had, most unwillingly, been constrained to wed her, was yet loyal and true to his useful partner; but Alfonso was a stern lord, and one who would, beyond a doubt, have made short work with a wanton wife. When Lucrezia first arrived in Ferrara she was taken by Alfonso-and he probably had a meaning in what he did-to the Aurora, at the foot of the Lion's Tower, where, by order of Niccolo the Third, his son Ugo and his wife Parisina Malatesta were beheaded, in the presence of the father and husband, for incestuous adultery. Lucrezia, without support from father or brother, free from their influence, and in a regal position open to the fierce light that beats upon a throne, may have desired to atone for her past by a better life. It is by no means, as I hold, difficult to reconcile the criminal Lucrezia of grand and gloomy Rome with the popular Duchess of the gayer and lighter Ferrara. Lucrezia was too wary and too wise to risk, in Ferrara, the loss of throne, of husband, and of life. Gibbon says, in his "Antiquities of the House of Brunswick :" "The house of Este was sullied by a sanguinary and incestuous race-by the nuptials of Alfon

so the First with Lucretia, a bastard of Alexander the Sixth, the Tiberius of Christian Rome. This modern Lucretia might have assumed, with more propriety, the name of Messalina; since the woman who can be guilty, who can even be accused, of a criminal intercourse with a father and two brothers, must be abandoned to all the licentiousness of venal love." I think that Gibbon may well be left to answer Roscoe.

Of Guicciardini himself Sir W. Jones says: "We have finished the twentieth and last book of Guicciardini's history; the most authentic, I believe (may I add, I fear?), that ever was composed. I believe it, because the historian was an actor in his terrible drama, and personally knew the principal performers in it; and I fear it, because it exhibits the woful picture of society in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.' In fact, the testimony of the old chronicler has never been historically impugned. Beauty dazzles judgment, and sentimentalists may decide not to receive evidence which tells against their sentiment; but they cannot shake the evidence of Guicciardini.

Herr

Herr Gregorovius asks whether Lucrezia's letter to Leo the Tenth, in which she begged for his Papal benediction, could have been written by such a sinner as she is believed to have been. 1 answer, most emphatically-yes! The letter is, indeed, highly characteristic of such a woman in such a time, and exemplifies, curiously, her views of her relations towards the Unseen. She, no doubt, believed, in her superstitious way, in the power of a Pope to tree her from all future consequences resulting from the commission of any sin. Gregorovius further appeals to women, and asks if they can believe that Lucrezia could be guilty of the crimes imputed to her. By "women" he must mean those of his own day : if he had put the same question to the women of Italy in Lucrezia's day, he would have received an answer but little favorable to his theory. In truth, that oscillation of opinion which tends to exculpate Lucrezia is a product of the sentimentalism of recent times. Some amiable persons do not like to believe things which cannot prettily be believed. The Renaissance knew its own children better, though it

The

is undoubtedly difficult for us to realize to our own minds the state of morals characteristic of that epoch. The chroniclers of the day, such men as Guicciardini, were honest and simple-minded recorders of facts of all but universal knowledge. It is not difficult to comprehend that they were the hearers of viva voce evidence of such cogency that, if we were to hear it now, it would dispel all tendency to sentimental "whitewashing." If we knew all that Guicciardini knew, Gregorovius's occupation would be gone. Alexander and Cæsar, despite their many heinous crimes, were the recipients of the most fulsome flattery; and, if they were, how much more would Lucrezia be the object of Renaissance eulogy! Nor is it an argument to say that the chief contemporary accusers, as Guicciardini and Sannazaro, wrote in Florence and in Naples. answer is, that then to write in Rome history adverse to the Borgia meant certain death. Cæsar, for a less thing, daggered his father's favorite secretary, Pedro Calderon Peretto; and he slew Cervillon and Franceso Troche, the latter also a private secretary of the Pope. Still, though he is no historian, there lived and wrote in Rome, in the days of the Borgias, a diarist whose work belongs to the most remarkable of literary productions. This man was Burkard, a native of Elsass, and master of the ceremonies to five Popes, one of whom was Alexander the Sixth. To his employers he probably appeared a simple and harmless pedant; and they could have no idea that the solemn and punctilious official was daily recording, for history, many of the chief events and crimes of the Vatican. Had Cæsar or Alexander suspected Burkard's daily occupation, his life would not have been worth an hour's purchase. Roman Catholic writers are very bitter against Burkard; but they forget those reports of ambassadors-the own correspondents' and reporters of the day-to their respective courts, which confirm the record of the master of the ceremonies. Many of these ambassadors' reports have disappeared, but the archives of the Italian Courts still contain a great number; and no historian of the Renaissance can now dispense with the assistance furnished by the contemporary

Burkard's diary is written with ultraTacitus-like brevity and condensation, and is cold, brief, and unimpassioned. If the events which he records ever cause any emotion in that official soul, he, at least, is careful not to show it. He seems to feel neither love nor hate, neither admiration nor indignation. Sometimes he is eloquently silent; sometimes he is even unusually curt and dry. To my fancy he always writes in a kind of haggard dread, glancing uneasily over his shoulder, and trembling at a noise in the wall, or at the hint of a coming step. He must well have known the danger of his occupation; and the character of his work shows us that he did realize the nature of the peril. He records those orgies in the Vatican, at one of which fifty of the leading hetaire of Rome assisted. Characteristic of the then state of Rome is the evidence, reported by Burkard, of one Giorgio Schiavoni, who happened to witness the throwing into the Tiber of the corpse of the murdered Gandia. Schiavoni, who was privately interrogated in the Vatican, stated that he saw two men on foot come down to the brink of the river, and look carefully about to see whether they were observed. Schiavoni was hidden in a boat. Seeing no one about, the two men beckoned, and another man appeared with a horse, across which lay a dead body, the head and arms of which were hanging down on one side of the animal, while the legs and feet hung down upon the other. The men then, with all their strength, flung the corpse into the water. Being asked by some man, apparently a cavalier, who was hidden in the darkness, whether the body was disposed of, they answered, audibly to Schiavoni, Signor, si." The dark master saw the deceased's mantle floating duskily upon the river, and when, speaking from out the gloom, he called attention to it, the other men threw stones upon it until it sank. Schiavoni was asked why he had not mentioned all this to the authorities; and he replied that he had seen in his time a hundred dead bodies thrown into the river at the same place, without any inquiry ever being made respecting them, so that he had not considered the event a matter of

ever, that of the Pope's son and Cardinal's brother, the Duke of Gandia. The clothes on the corpse were not disturbed, and thirty ducats were in a purse. The body bore nine wounds, one in the throat, the others in the head, body, and limbs. The face of the Signor present may have looked at the time less calmly handsome than was its wont. It was, says Guicciardini, comune proverbio, che il Papa non faceva mai quello che diceva, e il Valentino non diceva mai quello che faceva." Cæsar may have been taciturn on this occasion, but, unless Alexander had known that the one son had murdered the other, inquiry would not have slept; and no ordinary murderer would have escaped the doom attaching to the assassin of a Pope's son.

I have now endeavored to place before my readers a narrative, necessarily very brief, but yet, I hope, sufficiently comprehensive, of the leading events in the careers of the members of the Borgia triumvirate; and I have essayed to cite fairly the evidence for and against Lucrezia, and to state clearly the opposing views and opinions of assailants and of defendants. I am bound to admit that Herr Gregorovius does not, in my judgment, succeed in rebutting the contemporary and conclusive evidence against the fair devil." He has certainly succeeded in obscuring facts beneath a coat of whitewash, cleverly applied; but it is the office of criticism to remove the covering, and to restore the original picture in all its truth of drawing and force of coloring. This I have hoped to do.

The infra-human is thought to be unnatural. And yet the Renaissance was a state of society in which the Borgias were possible-nay, were actual-which led the maddened Savonarola to his bitter death, which stirred Luther into most active life, which revolted humanity and ripened the Reformation. We have no Shakespeare, we have no help even from Carlyle, to assist us in solving that problem of Lucrezia's guilt or innocence which is a problem only in consequence of the higher morality of later and of better times. We are left to our own imaginative insight or constructive imagination, and these, I think, condemn her, and judge Lucrezia as she

was judged by those who, living with her in her own day, knew alike the day, and knew her. The dark cloud which has rested so long upon her reputation seems, at first sight, about to lift, when we begin to listen hopefully to Gregorovius; but, after further study and more mature consideration, the black cloud settles darkly down in even deeper duskiness. We give her up to dramatist and librettist. We feel that they can

use her name and fame as a representative of charm and crime. At once so foul and fair, we know that Ferrara does not condone Rome; and that history contains no woman's name at once so famous and so infamous. We remain conscious that record, and that story, will brand forever as a name of scorn that of the dark and fair, the lovely and yet desperately wicked, LUCREZIA BORGIA. The Nineteenth Century.

PART II.

Saturday, November 13.-It seemed a great pity to leave Damascus so soon, but our time was running short, and the tents had to be struck after breakfast. We loitered as long as possible in the bazaars, buying pretty things, and it was half-past two before the luncheon-place near Artuz was reached. Though there was but little wind, we were overtaken by more than one sand-storm. We soon left the pleasant trees and shade near Damascus, and plodded along over the desert under a burning sun, with the sand occasionally whirling up into columns exactly like a water-spout. Our camping place for the night lay just outside the village of Kefr Hauwar. It was a lovely evening when we arrived; but when we looked out of our tent after dinner, there was a most suspicious halo round the moon to be seen, and in the middle of the night a furious gale and sand-storm came on and nearly blew us away. The tent-pitchers were obliged to sit up all night looking after the tentpegs and ropes, and in the morning every thing was an inch deep in dust.

We all sleep with revolvers under our pillows, but, in spite of this precaution, we two ladies don't feel at all safe in the tent by ourselves in this region of marauding Bedouins. We have therefore bought some mule bells and hung them on a string across the doorway of the tent, so that no one could enter without tumbling over them. With these, and "Akurah"-a dog we picked up at the village whose name he bears-we generally feel all right. Nevertheless, in

the middle of last night the bells gave a slight tinkle, which immediately awoke us, nor were we altogether reassured by hearing all manner of unfamiliar sounds outside. Still we preserved our courage pretty well until, by a single ray of moonlight shining in through the fastening of the flap which forms our door, we saw the gleam of a large knife. Evidently the moment for decisive action had arrived; some one must be cutting his way into the tent. I cocked my pistol and Evie lighted a match, but nothing could be heard except the wind. However, that it was not all our fancy or fright was proved by the fact that a large knife lay on the ground just inside the tent. Nothing more came of the alarm, and after some time we became very tired of our sentinel duty, and so went to sleep again. In the morning it was found that in securing our tent, which had been nearly blown over, one of our own men had managed to push his knife through the lining. Once through, he could not, in spite of all his struggles, get it back again, and as he heard the bells ringing, and knew we should awake, he very wisely dropped it and ran away.

Sunday, November 14.—The wind and dust are very bad to-day. Dressing is nearly as difficult as at sea in a gale of wind. Our tables are blown over as fast as we re-arrange them, and we have to hold on to our basins with one hand and wash our faces with the other. for the baths, they contain equal proportions of dust and water, and the result is mud. Altogether we are going through a disagreeable phase of tent life, and we begin to agree that there is

As