holly unlikely. But then
the best and most upright of men sought, without any scruples whatever,
the presence and favors of the Borgias. Pinturicchio and Perugino
painted for Alexander VI, and the most wonderful genius of the century,
Leonardo da Vinci, did not hesitate to enter the service of Caesar Borgia
as his engineer, to erect fortresses for him in the same Romagna which
he had appropriated by such devilish means.

The men of the Renaissance were in a high degree energetic and creative;
they shaped the world with a revolutionary energy and a feverish
activity, in comparison with which the modern processes of civilization
almost vanish. Their instincts were rougher and more powerful, and their
nerves stronger than those of the present race. It will always appear
strange that the tenderest blossoms of art, the most ideal creations of
the painter, put forth in the midst of a society whose moral
perversity and inward brutality are to us moderns altogether loathsome.
If we could take a man such as our civilization now produces and
transfer him into the Renaissance, the daily brutality which made no
impression whatever on the men of that age would shatter his nervous
system and probably upset his reason.

[Illustration: NICCOLO MACHIAVELLI.

From an engraving by G. Marri.]

Lucretia Borgia lived in Rome surrounded by these passions, and she was
neither better nor worse than the women of her time. She was thoughtless
and was filled with the joy of living. We do not know that she ever went
through any moral struggles or whether she ever found herself in
conscious conflict with the actualities of her life and of her
environment. Her father maintained an elaborate household for her, and
she was in daily intercourse with her brothers' courts. She was their
companion and the ornament of their banquets; she was entrusted with the
secret of all the Vatican intrigues which had any connection with the
future of the Borgias, and all her vital interests were soon to be
concentrated there.

Never, even in the later years of her life, does she appear as a woman
of unusual genius; she had none of the characteristics of the _viragos_
Catarina Sforza and Ginevra Bentivoglio; nor did she possess the
deceitful soul of an Isotta da Rimini, or the spirituelle genius of
Isabella Gonzaga. If she had not been the daughter of Alexander VI and
the sister of Caesar Borgia, she would have been unnoticed by the
historians of her age or, at mo