force.

In this was reason to spare for his being libelled and lampooned even
beyond the usual extravagant wont. Slanders concerning him and his son
Cesare were readily circulated, and they will generally be found to
spring from those States which had most cause for jealousy and resentment
of the Borgia might--Venice, Florence, and Milan, amongst others.

No rancour is so bitter as political rancour--save, perhaps, religious
rancour, which we shall also trace; no warfare more unscrupulous or more
prone to use the insidious weapons of slander than political warfare. Of
this such striking instances abound in our own time that there can scarce
be the need to labour the point. And from the form taken by such
slanders as are circulated in our own sedate and moderate epoch may be
conceived what might be said by political opponents in a fierce age that
knew no pudency and no restraint. All this in its proper place shall be
more closely examined.

For many of the charges brought against the House of Borgia some
testimony exists; for many others--and these are the more lurid,
sensational, and appalling covering as they do rape and murder, adultery,
incest, and the sin of the Cities of the Plain--no single grain of real
evidence is forthcoming. Indeed, at this time of day evidence is no
longer called for where the sins of the Borgias are concerned. Oft-
reiterated assertion has usurped the place of evidence--for a lie
sufficiently repeated comes to be credited by its very utterer. And
meanwhile the calumny has sped from tongue to tongue, from pen to pen,
gathering matter as it goes. The world absorbs the stories; it devours
them greedily so they be sensational, and writers well aware of this have
been pandering to that morbid appetite for some centuries now with this