e so peculiarly fitted for it
by the character of the studies he had pursued.

He was made Bishop of Valencia, created Cardinal in 1444, and
finally--in 1455--ascended the throne of St. Peter as Calixtus III, an
old man, enfeebled in body, but with his extraordinary vigour of mind
all unimpaired.

Calixtus proved himself as much a nepotist as many another Pope before
and since. This needs not to be dilated upon here; suffice it that
in February of 1456 he gave the scarlet hat of Cardinal-Deacon of San
Niccolo, in Carcere Tulliano, to his nephew Don Roderigo de Lanzol y
Borja.

Born in 1431 at Xativa, the son of Juana de Borja (sister of Calixtus)
and her husband Don Jofre de Lanzol, Roderigo was in his twenty-fifth
year at the time of his being raised to the purple, and in the following
year he was further created Vice-Chancellor of Holy Church with an
annual stipend of eight thousand florins. Like his uncle he had studied
jurisprudence--at the University of Bologna--and mentally and physically
he was extraordinarily endowed.

From the pen-portraits left of him by Gasparino of Verona, and Girolamo
Porzio, we know him for a tall, handsome man with black eyes and full
lips, elegant, courtly, joyous, and choicely eloquent, of such health
and vigour and endurance that he was insensible to any fatigue. Giasone
Maino of Milan refers to his "elegant appearance, serene brow, royal
glance, a countenance that at once expresses generosity and majesty, and
the genial and heroic air with which his whole personality is invested."
To a similar description of him Gasparino adds that "all women upon whom
he so much as casts his eyes he moves to love him; attracting them as
the lodestone attracts iron;" which is, it must be admitted, a most
undesirable reputation in a churchman.

A modern historian(1) who uses little restraint when writing of Roderigo
Borgia says of him that "he was a man of neither much energy nor
determined will," and further that "the firmness and energy wanting to
his character were, however, often replaced by the constancy of his evil
passions, by which he was almost blinded." How the constancy of evil
passions can replace firmness and energy as factors of worldly success
is not readily discernible, particularly if their possessor is blinded
by them. The historical worth of the stricture may safely be left to be
measured by its logical value. For the rest, to say that Roderigo Borgia
was wanting in energy and