[Footnote 24: See Rise and Fall of the Borgias, page 360.] ORIGIN AND PROGRESS OF PRINTING A.D. 1438

The bitterest and most powerful enemy of the Prior of St. Mark was the Pope himself,Alexander VI., of the infamous family of the Borgias,since his private vices were exposed, and by one whose order had been especially devoted to the papal empire.

How could I have borne your tones of anguish when you discovered that you were connected with the Borgias?

The apologue itself is not one of the least daring attacks on the Borgias and such scoundrels, who had just then afflicted Italy.

Who knows if another attack may not come, and all be finished?" The abbé had been secretary to the last of the Counts of Spada, one of the most powerful families of mediaeval Italy, and he, dying in poverty, had left Faria an old breviary, which had been in the family since the days of the Borgias.

" He had hardly spoken when a pallid young man, with a preternatural length and narrowness of face, began to talk to him about the sins of the Borgias.

The jar was marked with the name of a mineral salt, of a nature to have been serviceable in case of sudden illness in the time of the Borgias.

No more Clodaghs, Lucrezia Borgias, Semiramises, Pompadours, Irish Landlords, Hundred-Years' Warsyou see?' She kept her left eye obliquely cocked like a little fool, wondering, no doubt, what I was saying.

When Julius II. was elected in November 1503, it became at once apparent that he intended to complete what his hated predecessors, the Borgias, had begun, by reducing to his sway all the provinces over which the See of Rome had any claims, and creating a central power in Italy.

Unlike the Borgias, however, he entertained no plan of raising his own family to sovereignty at the expense of the Papal power.

Here, while the Borgias were turning the Vatican into a den of thieves and harlots, he executed the purest of all his statuesa "Pietà" in marble.

Yet who in Rome, among the courtiers of the Borgias, had brain or heart to understand these things?

It was to them the land of the Borgias and the Cenci; of families of proud nobles, luxurious, cultivated, but full of revenge and ferocious cunning; subtle poisoners, who killed with a perfumed glove or fan; parricides, atheists, committers of unnamable crimes, and inventors of strange and delicate varieties of sin.

A LITTLE SUPPER WITH THE BORGIAS.

That same evening, his godfather having been invited to supper, the notary spoke of a certain portrait acquired a few months before in the neighborhood of Játiva, a city that he had always regarded with interest on account of the Borgias having been born in one of its suburbs.

The Borgias; or, At the feet of Venus.

The incredible Borgias.

The Incredible Borgias, by Klabund, pseud. of Alfred Henschke.

The Borgias; or, At the feet of Venus.

The Borgias, for instance, were opposed to it.

Giovanni Sforza had been dispossessed of his dominions by the Borgias, after his divorce from Lucrezia, and died in 1501.

The Borgias ceased to reign in 1512; and Ginevra, apparently restored to her country, dedicated this picture, at once a memorial of her gratitude and of her faith.

A childless widow in delicate health, whose paternal family had been for the most part cruelly robbed, exiled, or destroyed by the reigning Pope and his family, she felt her own situation a most unprotected and precarious one, since the least jealousy or misunderstanding might bring upon her, too, the ill-will of the Borgias, which had proved so fatal to the rest of her race.

"Is it possible that you have come into collision with the dreadful Borgias?

In the reign of Julius II., the banished families who had been plundered by the Borgias were restored to their rights and honors at Rome; and there was a princess of the house of Sarelli then at Rome, whose sanctity of life and manners was held to go back to the traditions of primitive Christianity, so that she was renowned not less for goodness than for rank and beauty.