nergetic and good; for
the first time Romagna enjoyed peace and was rid of her vampires. In the
name of Cesare justice was administered by Antonio di Monte Sansovino,
President of the Ruota of Cesena, a man universally beloved."

It is almost as if the truth had slipped out unawares, for the first
period hardly seems a logical prelude to the second, by which it is
largely contradicted. If Cesare's government was so good that Romagna
knew peace at last and was rid of her vampires, why did cities tremble
before him? There is, by the way, no evidence of such trepidations in
any of the chronicles of the conquered States, one and all of which hail
Cesare as their deliverer. Why, if he was held in such terror, did city
after city--as we have seen--spontaneously offer itself to Cesare's
dominion?

But to rebut those statements of Gregorovius's there is scarce the need
to pose these questions; sufficiently does Gregorovius himself
rebut them. The men who praised Cesare, the historian tells us, were
sycophantic courtiers. But where is the wonder of his being praised if
his government was as good as Gregorovius admits it to have been? What
was unnatural in that praise? What so untruthful as to deserve to be
branded sycophantic? And by what right is an historian to reject as
sycophants the writers who praise a man, whilst accepting every word
of his detractors as the words of inspired evangelists, even when
their falsehoods are so transparent as to provoke the derision of the
thoughtful and analytic?

As l'Espinois points out in his masterly essay in the Revue des
Questions Historiques, Gregorovius refuses to recognize in Cesare Borgia
the Messiah of a united Central Italy, but considers him merely as
a high-flying adventurer; whilst Villari, in his Life and Times of
Macchiavelli, tells you bluntly that Cesare Borgia was neither a
statesman nor a soldier but a brigand-chief.

These are mere words; and to utter words is easier than to make them
good.

"High-flying adventurer," or "brigand-chief," by all means, if it
please you. What but a high-flying adventurer was the wood-cutter, Muzio
Attendolo, founder of the ducal House of Sforza? What but a high-flying
adventurer was that Count Henry of Burgundy who founded the kingdom
of Portugal? What else was the Norman bastard William, who conquered
England? What else the artillery officer, Napoleon Bonaparte, who became
Emperor of the French? What else was the founder of any dynast