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without interruption."* Then the good Duke would sally forth o' nights, and looking in quite unexpectedly take pot luck at supper with his loving subjects, in genuine Caliph Haroun Alraschid fashion.

Neither then nor at any other time was any court in Italy so thronged with men of learning and genius. For such, come they from what nation they might, there was always a warm welcome, and assistance, if they needed it. Then again the court of Ferrara was a noted resort of noble knights, who had differences touching their honour, to put to the arbitrement of the sword. For the sport-loving Duke was always ready to afford a tilting-ground, and the countenance of his august presence to champions in need of such accommodation. Many accordingly were the celebrated duels which came off at Ferrara, to the infinite satisfaction and diversion of the Duke and his subjects. Then as for his piety, if all the churches and monasteries he built were not enough to vouch for it, says Frizzi, piously, it is abundantly proved by his habit of going to various churches accompanied by all his famous band, there to have mass celebrated with all the attractions of music. Besides, in holy week, he used to wash the feet of hundreds of old men! What more would you have?

His son Alphonso, born in 1476, succeeded him in 1505. This prince's first wife, Anna Strozzi, having died in 1477, he married in 1501 the too celebrated Lucrezia Borgia. That such a marriage could have been thought possible, that it should have been proposed to the court of Ferrara, and accepted by Alphonso and his father, are facts which very

* Frizzi, vol. iv. p. 217.

strikingly set 'before us the vastness of the difference between the habits of thought and feeling of an Italian of the fifteenth and an Englishman of the nineteenth century. The consideration of a gulf of separation so impassable warns us of the exceeding difficulty of so sympathising with the men of that time and country, as to form any tolerably fair appreciation of their conduct; not merely in the sense of morally judging of it, with reference to the responsi bilities of the individual, with which wholly impossible task we have fortunately no need to meddle; but in the sense of comprehending the bearing and weight of the motives which regulated it.

Lucrezia was twenty-five at the time of this her fourth marriage. What the tenour of her life had been, and the nature of the scenes she had passed through, the English reader is probably in some small degree aware; in a very small degree, unless indeed he happens to have sought out in the folio Latin columns of the contemporary chroniclers the details of abominations wholly unreproducible in any modern page. And yet this woman, whose moral nature, if judged according to our habits of thought, must be deemed to have been saturated with impurity, and hopelessly depraved and destroyed, is proposed and accepted as the wife of a prince, whose character stands higher than that of any of his contemporaries of the sovereign houses of Italy, and whose family was already remarkable among them for enlightenment and respectability!-accepted to be the mother of his children, and the means of transmitting his unsullied name and crown!

A very noteworthy instance of the extraordinary incompatibility of the moral feelings of those times.

LUCREZIA BORGIA.

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of

with our own, or of our imperfect appreciation of the exact value of the terms used, occurs in a passage the "Relazione,*" of the Venetian ambassador Paolo Cappello, who, returning from Alexander the Sixth's Court in 1500, tells the Senate that Lucrezia is "prudent and liberal "-savia e liberale and adds within five lines, without further remark, that it is said, that she had an incestuous connection with her brother! +

But perhaps the most extraordinary and interesting fact of Lucrezia's history, is that after her marriage with Alphonso, not only was her life blameless, but her conduct was such as to merit and secure her highminded husband's affection and esteem, and in all respects to do honour to her station. Her marriage with Alphonso therefore divides, as by an abruptly and suddenly drawn line, the life of Lucrezia into two portions, the earlier all black with atrocities and abominations unspeakable, the latter shining with purity and many noble virtues. Such a statement has been deemed to involve an absolute moral impossibility; and Roscoe has been induced by the consideration of it, to attempt a denial of the charges which have made Lucrezia Borgia's name a by-word of infamy.

"If the Ethiopian cannot change his skin," he writes, "nor the leopard his spots, how are we to conceive it possible that a person, who had during so many years of her life been sunk into the lowest depths of guilt and infamy could at once emerge to respectability and virtue? The history of mankind furnishes no instances of such a rapid change."

* Relazioni degli Ambasciatori Veneti, ser. xi. vol. iii. p. 11.
+ Noto 1.

Appendix, on Lucrezia Borgia; Life of Leo X.

But Roscoe's elaborate though weak defence signally breaks down. It would extend what has already undesignedly assumed the proportions of a digression far too much to enter into an examination of the historical evidence on the subject. It will be sufficient to observe, that Roscoe's "chivalrous" attempt, as somebody with infinite absurdity somewhere calls it, was abundantly demolished by the "Edinbro' Review," January, 1806, at the time. And further evidence than was then accessible to the reviewer, has since been made available to establish the historical certainty, that the earlier portion of Lucrezia's life was in truth all that it has been ordinarily supposed to have been. On the correctness of the account of the latter portion, as stated above, no doubt has ever been cast. So that we in reality have this whitewashed-blacka-moor phenomenon before us, to make of it what we may.

*

Gibbon disposes of the matter by observing, that "perhaps the youth of Lucrezia had been seduced by example; perhaps she had been satiated by pleasure; perhaps she was awed by the authority of her new parent and husband," Alphonso, and his father Hercules. But the moral philosopher will hardly deem any of these suppositions a satisfactory explanation of the facts before him. And a more serious consideration of them will perhaps lead him to the conclusion, that whatever of strangeness or novelty they may present, is rather matter for the historian's study than for his own.

Well convinced of the reality of the impossibility alleged, that any human being should pass suddenly

Antiq. of the House of Brunswick.

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from such a moral state as that indicated to our judgments by the facts of Lucrezia's early career, to such an ethical condition as that presumed to accompany her later life, while he in no wise seeks to invalidate the historical evidence of the case, he will yet deny such change to have been accomplished. Knowing how large a portion of the spiritual deterioration arising from any outward acts, is dependent on the degree to which the conscience of the agent is enlightened, he will deny that Lucrezia's moral state during the first part of her life was such as we are apt to conceive that it needs must have been. Aware how very much of the difficulty of turning from evil to good, consists in the arduousness of the struggle to rise from infamy to good repute, he will assert, that Lucrezia could not have been sunk in that depth of infamy to which we suppose that the admitted facts of her conduct must necessarily have consigned her.

For the moralist there will be nothing new or striking in all this. The interesting significance of the phenomenon is for the historian. That restoration and rehabilitation, it would appear, which would be impossible in the nineteenth, was possible in the fifteenth century. The gulf which would now be wholly impassable, did not then yawn so wide as to make crossing it impossible. Here is to be found the explanation, and herein consists the historical interest of the facts of the case. The finely organised moral sense of the nineteenth century would have been wholly killed by similar wounds, and the spiritual destruction of the individual would have been irretrievable. But the lower, coarser, more rudimentary moral sense of the "ages of faith" was not wholly