admitted as a proof that Cæsar Borgia was the perpetrator of the murder of his brother, the imputation is in itself in the highest degree improbable, and the transaction must therefore be judged by such positive evidence as yet remains, without presuming the guilt of Borgia from circumstances which are yet more questionable than the crime of which he stands accused." Roscoe takes the most particular account of the transaction as given by Burchardt, (the account which is quoted by Dr. Madden), and what does it amount to? In effect to this, that for a month before the fatal night an unknown person in a mask had visited him daily; that after supping with his mother, in company with Cæsar his brother, they proceeded_from her house together for some distance, when the Duke parted from the Cardinal, (informing him that he had to pay a visit,) and dismissing all his servants but the masked person and a footman, went away. At a certain spot he left his servant, and proceeded alone with the masked person, being the last time he was seen alive, save by his murderers. Within a short time he must have been murdered, and it must have been in the company of the masked person, who does not appear ever to have been discovered. Now, such being the facts, and remembering moreover the dreadful state of Rome during the pontificates of Sixtus and Alexander, owing to the turbulent conduct of the nobility, who, in the absence of the Popes from Rome, had become lawless and reckless in the last degree; recollecting also that the Borgias had bitter enemies, and enemies well capable of the crime of assassination, a crime so common in Rome that upwards of two hundred instances of it occurred in a short period of that era; remembering these circumstances, one should have thought that the most obvious and probable supposition would have been adopted that an enemy had done this. But alas! no, there is malignity more fell than that of the murderer, and this malignity prompted some of those who hated the family to strive to inflict upon it a deadlier wound than the assassin's, and brand it with the awful guilt of fratricide. Nothing but the most malignant enmity could have devised so fiend-like an accusation-for all the facts absolutely, utterly negative it, and make it palpably false, flagrantly impossible. The Duke parts from the Cardinal and proceeds in a different direction with his own servant: parts from him, and proceeds alone with a mysterious and

masked stranger, as to whom nothing is known. Throughout the whole narrative, says the intelligent historian, there is not the slightest indication that Cæsar had any share in the transaction, and the continuance of the favour of his father and mother after the event may prove to every impartial mind that he was not even suspected by them as the author of the crime." Such is the calm, deliberate judgment of an eminently calm and dispassionate mindthe mind of a Protestant-as to this, the chief charge against Cæsar Borgia: a charge indeed comprising a combination of charges of the most horrible, diabolical and unnatural criminality. The learned Roscoe is of opinion that these accusations against the Borgias are false; and confessedly there is not the shadow of actual evidence, however remote or circumstantial, against them. All rests on bare surmise, without an excuse even for suspicion, the mere invention of a murderous hate. Strange that calumnies discredited by Protestant historians should be greedily received by Catholics, and that the children of the Papacy should gather up to assail it with accusations which its opponents despise !

The other of the accusations against Cæsar, and indirectly against Alexander, who is represented as sanctioning the crimes of his son, is the execution of the conspirators of Sinigaglia-men who had combined to destroy him. This we have already disposed of.

A more striking instance is that of Alexander's daughter, Lucretia. Every one knows the horrible accusations by which she has been assailed, and we hope every one knows how admirably she has been vindicated by the learned labours of Roscoe. "The historians of Ferrara mention her with the highest praise. Her marriage with Alfonso of Este was celebrated in a Latin epithalamium by Ariosto; and if the moral character of the bride had been so notoriously disgraceful as to render her an object of abhorrence, it is scarcely to be supposed that Ariosto would have had the effrontery or the absurdity to represent her as rivalling in the decorum of her manners as well as in the beauty of her person all that former times could boast." In the forty-second book of his immortal poem he has raised a temple of female excellence, the splendid niches of which are occupied by women of the greatest merit and chief distinction in Italy, and among them Lucretia Borgia assumes the first and most conspicuous station. The

celebrated printer, Aldo Manuzio, tells her that her chief desire is to stand approved by God and to be useful not only to the present age but to future times, so that when you quit this life you may leave behind you a monument that you have not lived in vain, and he commends in the warmest terms her piety, her liberality, and her justice. Now as the assailants of Alexander associate his iniquity especially with that of his daughter, her vindication is in a great measure his own: the more so if we consider that she was undoubtedly the object of his most anxious affection, (which he evinced in the most truly paternal way in carefully attending to her happiness in her matrimonial unions), and the fair and ordinary presumption is, that a daughter undoubtedly sometimes owed in some degree her virtue to his care. Thus then the demoniacal malice of his slanderers recoils upon themselves and helps to refute their diabolical accusations. That affection for her, which with fiend-like malignity they distort into a crime, is by her admirable character, as testified by the noblest writers of the age, converted into his most victorious vindication. On what perilous ground a Catholic author is when he ventures rashly to assail the character of a Pontiff, one or two passages from the concluding portions of Dr. Madden's work will sadly illustrate. "It is the fact (he says) that Alexander committed no act against the faith, and promulgated no decree in contravention of doctrines duly sanctioned by the Church in its councils." These last words seem to imply an unconsciousness that the decrees of Popes, ex cathedra, declare doctrines "duly sanctioned by the Church," whether or not sanctioned by any of its councils. In the next page, however, he says: "If Alexander never promulgated any doctrine as an article of faith that was not orthodox, it cannot be said that he never issued any bull, ordinance, or rescript whose decisions were at variance with the eternal principles of justice, truth, and morality." The writer evidently thinks that Popes-even Popes who decree nothing contrary to the faith-may nevertheless issue decrees or briefs "at variance with justice, truth, and morality." There is a more than questionable character in this: and the passage reveals a confusion of ideas which renders it obscure: nor is the obscurity diminished by the gross inconsistency of the very next sentence with that which went before. "The whole pontifical career" (i.e. his acts as Pontiff, or at least while

Pontiff)" of Alexander was one unbroken succession of outrages against all those principles. It was in practice a downright disregard of Christianity: a mad, reckless infidelity: an atheism manifested not in words but acts, supervening on unbridled lust, rapacity, and ambition. There is an incoherent extravagance in this shocking sentence which makes it difficult to dissect it. But if it have any meaning it means this-that a Pontiff who does not act against the faith may act all through the whole of his pontifical career with downright disregard of Christianity. The "whole of his pontifical career" must at least, and one should supppose peculiarly if not exclusively, include his acts as Pontiff; and how a Pontiff who never committed any act against the faith could always act with disregard of Christianity is hard to understand.

It is obvious that this is reckless raving. We will show that it is so out of the writer's own words in the next page. He is obliged to admit what we have all along been arguing,-"That the political enmity of so many adversaries has caused his crimes against one virtue in particular, (he evidently means the virtue of chastity), from the time of his elevation to the pontificate, to be exaggerated." He adds, and let the reader mark-" There is no conclusive evidence to be found in the history of his times, of his having flagrantly violated his vows of chastity during the period of his pontificate.". Passing over the peculiar sophistry which seems to insinuate that a Pontiff may violate his vows of chastity without flagrantly violating them; and the unfairness of suggesting that there is any evidence of Alexander's having done so flagrantly or not during the period of his pontificate, when it must be known to Dr. Madden there is none at all-passing this by, the admission of Dr. Madden is enough to convict him of great rashness in so recklessly charging Alexander VI., the Pope, with "unbridled lust,"-when on his own confession there is no conclusive evidence of his having ever once violated his vows of chastity after he ascended the apostolical throne. We go farther, and we say that, seeing that the assailants of Alexander make his lust while Pope one of their chief charges, and on the confession of one of his most determined assailants, that it is a foul calumny; this should have suggested to the mind of any Catholic writer a charitable suspicion that the other accusations against this much maligued pontiff were

equally false, and prevented a wholesale and reckless repetition of them in language the most inflamed and most envenomed. But this is not all; no, nor nearly all. What will the reader say when he is assured that the admission which Dr. Madden so reluctantly makes as to the chastity of Alexander during his pontificate, might and ought equally to be made as to his prelacy and cardinalate? It is so. For there is not an atom of credible evidence that Alexander, after entering the Church, carried on any impure connection; and there are strong reasons to suppose the reverse. One reason is, that it would have been almost impossible for a person of such distinction, and with such remorseless foes, to have carried on a criminal intercourse without facts transpiring which would have been trumpeted forth with triumph instead of vague, general abuse. Another, and a stronger reason is this, that, whereas the chief charge against him is his care for his natural children, (a queer kind of charge,-for surely if it were a crime to have them, it were a virtue to take care of them,) and yet we never heard of any younger than Cæsar and Lucretia; and there is, as Dr. Madden admits, great doubt whether they were sister and brother, which, of itself raises a fair question whether there were not truth in the representation of Alexander that Cæsar was not his son at all, but the legitimate son of the widow with whom in early life he had lived. Anyhow, if he had ever since their birth been living in a criminal state, it is. not easily accountable that no children are heard of at all after that time than they, and they were born when he was not a priest at all, but a soldier; and a soldier, in an age certainly as corrupt as any that had passed away. All the coarse calumnies about the unbridled lust of Alexander, therefore, come to this, that some twenty years before he was Pope-before he was a priest-while he was a gay and gallant soldier, he had lived in sin. Why the same might probably be said of St. Ignatius, and probably would have been said had he been Pope in the age of Alexander. Really and truly, when the evidence is looked to, this is all that it comes to. There are heaps of obscene assertions by writers in the interest of his foes, but of credible evidence there is none to any greater extent than what we have stated.

In addition to the discredit thrown upon all the accusations of Alexander by the established falsehood of the