men;
but, except in some visionary monk, life can never be poisoned by the
mere knowledge of evil. Their town maybe betrayed to the enemy, their
daughters may be dishonoured or poisoned, their sons massacred; they
may, in their old age, be cast starving on the world, or imprisoned or
broken by torture; and they will complain and be fierce in diatribe: the
fiercest diatribe written against any Pope of the Renaissance being,
perhaps, that of Platina against Paul II., who was a saint compared with
his successors Sixtus and Alexander, because the writer of the diatribe
and his friends were maltreated by this pope. When personally touched,
the Italians of the Renaissance will brook no villainy--the poniard
quickly despatches sovereigns like Galeazzo Maria Sforza; but when the
villainy remains abstract, injures neither themselves nor their
immediate surroundings, it awakens no horror, and the man who commits it
is by no means regarded as a fiend. The great criminals of the
Renaissance--traitors and murderers like Lodovico Sforza, incestuous
parricides like Gianpaolo Baglioni, committers of every iniquity under
heaven like Caesar Borgia--move through the scene of Renaissance history,
as shown by its writers great and small, quietly, serenely,
triumphantly; with gracious and magnanimous bearing; applauded, admired,
or at least endured. On their passage no man, historian or chronicler,
unless the agent of a hostile political faction, rises up, confronts
them and says, "This man is a devil."

And devils these men were not: the judgment of their contemporaries,
morally completely perverted, was probably psychologically correct; they
misjudged the deeds, but rarely, perhaps, misjudged the man. To us
moderns, as to our English ancestors of the sixteenth century, this is
scarcely conceivable. A man who does devilish deeds is necessarily a
devil; and the evil Italian princes of the Renaissance, the Borgias,
Sforzas, Baglionis, Malatestas, and Riarios appear, through the mist of
horrified imagination, so many uncouth and gigantic monsters, nightmare
shapes, less like human beings than like the grand and frightful angels
of evil who gather round Milton's Satan in the infernal council. Such
they appear to us. But if we once succeed in calmly looking at them,
seeing them not in the lurid lights and shadows of our fancy, but in the
daylight of contemporary reality, we shall little by little be forced to
confess (and the confession is horri