he light of the Christian ideal. In
this form we behold and recognize them. We view their acts through a
medium which is permeated with religious ideas. Without this, and
placed on a purely secular stage, the Borgias would have fallen into a
position much less conspicuous than that of many other men, and would
soon have ceased to be anything more than representatives of a large
species.

We possess the history of Alexander VI and Caesar, but of Lucretia Borgia
we have little more than a legend, according to which she is a fury, the
poison in one hand, the poignard in the other; and yet this baneful
personality possessed all the charms and graces.

Victor Hugo painted her as a moral monster, in which form she still
treads the operatic stage, and this is the conception which mankind in
general have of her. The lover of real poetry regards this romanticist's
terrible drama of Lucretia Borgia as a grotesque manifestation of the
art, while the historian laughs at it; the poet, however, may excuse
himself on the ground of his ignorance, and of his belief in a myth
which had been current since the publication of Guicciardini's history.

Roscoe, doubting the truth of this legend, endeavored to disprove it,
and his apology for Lucretia was highly gratifying to the patriotic
Italians. To it is due the reaction which has recently set in against
this conception of her. The Lucretia legend may be analyzed most
satisfactorily and scientifically where documents and mementos of her
are most numerous; namely, in Rome, Ferrara, and Modena, where the
archives of the Este family are kept, and in Mantua, where those of the
Gonzaga are preserved. Occasional publications show that the interesting
question still lives and remains unanswered.

The history of the Borgias was taken up again by Domenico Cerri in his
work, _Borgia ossia Alessandro VI, Papa e suoi contemporanei_, Turin,
1858. The following year Bernardo Gatti, of Milan, published Lucretia's
letters to Bembo. In 1866 Marquis G. Campori, of Modena, printed an
essay entitled _Una vittima della storia Lucrezia Borgia_, in the _Nuova
Antologia_ of August 31st of that year. A year later Monsignor
Antonelli, of Ferrara, published _Lucrezia Borgia in Ferrara, Sposa a
Don Alfonso d'Este, Memorie storiche_, Ferrara, 1867. Giovanni
Zucchetti, of Mantua, immediately followed with a similar opuscule:
_Lucrezia Borgia Duchessa di Ferrara_, Milano, 1869. All these writers
endeavored, with the