"Borgia" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... restless and easily led; a lesson in time may save his honored house from disaster. But to Carillo no quarter." He rose and stood over them. "The best thing in Machiavelli's 'Prince,'" he said, "is the author's advice to Caesar Borgia to exterminate every member of the reigning house of a conquered country, in order to avoid future revolutions and their infinitely greater number of dead. Do not let the water in your blood whimper for mercy. You are not here to protect ...
— The Doomswoman - An Historical Romance of Old California • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... arrived before Atella at the beginning of July. The king of Naples was no sooner advised of his approach, than he marched out of camp, attended by the Venetian general, the marquis of Mantua, and the papal legate, Caesar Borgia, to receive him. All were eager to do honor to the man who had achieved such brilliant exploits; who, in less than a year, had made himself master of the larger part of the kingdom of Naples, and that, with the most limited resources, in defiance of the bravest and best disciplined soldiery ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V2 • William H. Prescott
... Reginald. It had been painted in early youth; the features were beautiful, disdainful,—with a fierceness breaking through the courtly air. The eyes were very fine, black as midnight, and piercing as those of Caesar Borgia, as seen in Raphael's wonderful picture in the Borghese Palace at Rome. They seemed to fascinate the gazer—to rivet his glances—to follow him whithersoever he went—and to search into his soul, as did the dark ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... mediaeval, nor had the Roman fashion of the vast interior power to hold one's imagination enchained to the Cross of Calvary. The white robes of the altar servants, broidered vestments of the priests and pallid torches of a hundred candles belonged to the Rome of Caesar Borgia and not to the Rome of Caesar Nero. Into that singular building, impressive in its incompleteness, crept no echo of the catacombs, and the sighing of the reed notes was voluptuous as a lover's whisper, and as far removed from the murmurs of the Christian martyrs. Here ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... 'Semiramis' of Voltaire, in the 'Merope' of Alfieri, in the 'Ion' of Euripides, and again and again in Victor Hugo's dramas. M. Polti points out that this single situation is utilized as the culminating point at the very end of four of Hugo's plays—the 'Burgraves,' 'Marie Tudor,' 'Lucrece Borgia' and 'Le Roi s'amuse' (which supplied the plot for the opera of 'Rigoletto') and he insists further that one or another subdivision of this situation has been employed by Hugo at least five times in the single drama of 'Lucrece Borgia.' If there ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... those who have not read the play it is only necessary to observe, in order to understand what follows, that Victor Hugo, with that violent effort after a moral novelty which distinguishes him, has chosen to represent the infamous Lucretia Borgia as under the influence of maternal love, while in all other respects she fully sustains her odious and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... Barrault in the Logis Barrault, built by a former mayor of the city, one time Chancellor of Brittany, was the scene of the magnificent entertainment offered Caesar Borgia in 1497. Afterwards it became the residence of Marie de Medicis; later, a monastic establishment, then a seminary, and lately simply an ordinary private school. Says one writer, "No wonder its remains should be so scanty and ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun
... of mine to me one day: "Listen, I want you to meet this man X——. You will like him. He is fine. You haven't any idea what a fascinating person he really is. He looks like a Russian Grand Duke. He has the manners and the tastes of a Medici or a Borgia. He is building a great house down on Long Island that once it is done will have cost him five or six hundred thousand. It's worth seeing already. His studio here in the C—— studio building is a dream. ...
— Twelve Men • Theodore Dreiser
... likely he'd have focused all the crockery on the table upon him, which you can bet your last peso wouldn't have proved no desid'ratum. For while Missis Rucker ain't what I calls onusual peevish, for a lady to set thar quiet an' be p'inted to by some onlicensed boarder as a Borgia, that away, would be more'n female ...
— Faro Nell and Her Friends - Wolfville Stories • Alfred Henry Lewis
... towns of Central Italy which Leonardo visited in 1502, when in the service of Cesare Borgia, are reproduced here in the same order as in the note book used during these travels (MS. L., Institut de France). These notes have but little interest in themselves excepting as suggesting his itinerary. The ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... supper. I had no saddle, as mine had been left at the camp a mile distant, so taking the harness from Brigham, I mounted him bareback and started out after the game, being armed with my celebrated buffalo-killer, "Lucretia Borgia,"—a newly-improved breech-loading needle gun, which I ...
— The Life of Hon. William F. Cody - Known as Buffalo Bill The Famous Hunter, Scout and Guide • William F. Cody
... traditions, and the Medici name never stood so low as during his period of power. Himself illegitimate, he was the father of an illegitimate son, Alessandro, for whose advancement he toiled much as Alexander VI had toiled for that of Caesar Borgia. He had not the black, bold wickedness of Alexander VI, but as Pope Clement VII, which he became in 1523, he was little less admirable. He was cunning, ambitious, and tyrannical, and during his pontificate ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... brighter task is for another pen; mine only to turn over the bloodstained and black pages of the Church. One name stands out in the list of the pontiffs of this century, which is almost unparalleled in its infamy; it is that of Roderic Borgia, Pope Alexander VI. Foully vicious, cruel, and bloodthirsty, he is startlingly bad, even for a pope. Among his children are found the names of Caesar and Lucretia Borgia, names whose very mention recalls ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant
... of religion was there a nobler law. A Sixtus, at that very moment, was letting loose the horrors of an unjust war upon Florence and Ferrara in the name of the Prince of Peace, while the sinister figure of Alexander Borgia sat upon the steps of the Papal throne biding its time. If the meek inherited the earth, it was commonly a territory six feet long and two in breadth. Everywhere the ancient rule was still the modern plan: those took ...
— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond
... the speeches of Clara Smith's counsel, who was known by the delightfully Oklahomite title of Wild Bill McLean, were wild enough in all conscience; but they left very little of my friend's illusion that members of the Upper Ten could not be accused of crimes. Nero and Borgia were quite presentable people compared with Senator Hamon when Wild Bill McLean had done with him. But the difference was deeper, and even in a sense more delicate than this. There is a certain tone about English trials, which does at least begin with a certain scepticism about ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... man, with shining black eyes, and a voice like a great bell—quite pretty at the top, though: he must have been sixty at least; and he was very fat; but he was the most dignified man I ever saw. You should have heard him do the Duke in Lucrezia Borgia, or sing Pro Peccatis from Rossini's Stabat Mater! I was ten years old when he was with us, and my grand ambition was to sing with him when I grew up. He would shake his head if he saw Susanetta now. I would rather hear him sing three bars ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw
... mention of poison Lucretia Borgia springs to mind. This is the lady of whom Gibbon writes with ...
— She Stands Accused • Victor MacClure
... harryings of the enemy, leaving them no peace. But they were further prompted, indeed, first incited, by the suddenly changed ways of Mocmohoc, who, though hitherto deemed a savage almost perfidious as Caesar Borgia, yet now put on a seeming the reverse of this, engaging to bury the hatchet, smoke the pipe, and be friends forever; not friends in the mere sense of renouncing enmity, but in the sense of kindliness, ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... Anglican orders was often discussed at the Observatory, and I no doubt gave great offence by openly declaring in my imperfect English that I considered Luther a better channel for the transmission of the Holy Ghost than a Caesar Borgia or even a Wolsey. Anyhow I could not bring myself to see the importance of such questions, if only the heart was right and if the whole of our life was in fact a real and constant life with God and in God. That is what I called a truly religious ...
— My Autobiography - A Fragment • F. Max Mueller
... exclaimed that I make no difference between good men and bad, that I lump Torquemada, Lucrezia Borgia, Fenelon, and Marcus Aurelius together, and condone ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford
... occurred in 1484, after a reign of thirteen years. The statement is that of Burcardo (Burckhardt), the papal master of the ceremonies, the same writer whose diary, jotted down from day to day, has revealed to us the incredible atrocities of the court of Alexander VI., the Borgia pope, who died in 1503. "For all that I could do," writes the master of the ceremonies, who perhaps at that time occupied some less conspicuous post in the papal court, "I could not get a basin, a towel, or any kind of utensil in which the wine and the water for the odoriferous herbs could ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, April 1875, Vol. XV., No. 88 • Various
... carried away by the French have been restored. Among the paintings of this palace, the most beautiful are Raffaelle's frescos in the stanze and loggie. The principal oil paintings are in the appartamento Borgia, which also contains the Transfiguration, by Raphael. In the Sistine chapel is the Last Judgment by Michael Angelo. The popes have chosen the palace of Monte Cavallo, or the Quirinal palace, with ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects and Curiosities of Art (Vol. 3 of 3) • S. Spooner
... us. Some day, Dick, I'll lose my temper, tie Penfield in a hard knot and throw him into the river! It's like a chapter out of Lucretia Borgia!" ...
— Empire Builders • Francis Lynde
... me that her favourite character in history was Lucrezia Borgia, and when she saw my horror, immediately added: 'Well, no, I am only joking!' Such was her duplicity: for I see now that she lived in the constant effort to hide her heinous heart from me. Yet, now I think of it, how completely did Clodagh ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... perceptions and a penchant for just the right social touch or note, how much better he would do! He came home bringing a Perugino, brilliant examples of Luini, Previtali, and Pinturrichio (this last a portrait of Caesar Borgia), which he picked up in Italy, to say nothing of two red African vases of great size that he found in Cairo, a tall gilt Louis Fifteenth standard of carved wood that he discovered in Rome, two ornate candelabra from Venice for his walls, and a pair of Italian ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... Convent of the Ursulines, where they were celebrating midnight service for the safety of New France. Amid the sweet voices that floated up on the notes of the pealing organ was clearly distinguished that of Mere St. Borgia, the aunt of Angelique, who led the choir of nuns. In trills and cadences of divine melody the voice of Mere St. Borgia rose higher and higher, like a spirit mounting the skies. The words were indistinct, but Angelique knew them by heart. She had visited her aunt in ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... a son of the renowned painter, Wilhelm von Kaulbach. A pupil of Piloty, he was born at Munich in 1846, and has produced some works of a historic character, such as "Lucrezia Borgia," "Voltaire at Paris," "Louis XI. and His Barber," and "The Last Days of Mozart," but is perhaps still more successful with his admirable pictures of childhood. We must not forget to mention his "Madonna," a work which should add ...
— Among the Great Masters of Music - Scenes in the Lives of Famous Musicians • Walter Rowlands
... again! There then is no redress for me, at least None but that which I may achieve myself, Since I am driven to the brink.—But, say, 45 My innocent sister and my only brother Are dying underneath my father's eye. The memorable torturers of this land, Galeaz Visconti, Borgia, Ezzelin, Never inflicted on their meanest slave 50 What these endure; shall they have ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... certain it is that he entertains a horrible spite against musicians. He may have been distracted by diabolical hand-organs, or driven wild by bungling buglists, but why should he include worthy and unoffending artists in his hatred? The revenge of a BORGIA was not more terrible or cruel than that of this architect. He has put the orchestra so far below the stage that no part of the latter is visible ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 16, July 16, 1870 • Various
... opium and Spanish flies, combined with some other ingredients, which, however, are only known to the makers of it. That the Acqua Tofana is made from the foam sometimes found upon the lips of the dying, is an idle tale. Allessandro Borgia was the first to ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... to the opera. "Lucretia Borgia" is to be performed. I have learned a song from Lucia. So you can imagine how ...
— As I Remember - Recollections of American Society during the Nineteenth Century • Marian Gouverneur
... by T. Baden, containing a description and analysis of the gestures and posture of a number of familiar figures from comedy exemplified in some collections of statuettes (chiefly those in Borgia's Museum of Baden's time), is open to the same objection as the above. The gestures of slave, pander, parasite, etc., described in the article are lively and expressive to be sure, but contain little to differentiate them ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • Wilton Wallace Blancke
... suppose that the cult of "the Blonde Beast," and the cult of Caesar Borgia, were anything but mad reprisals, directed towards himself, in savage revenge; blind blows struck at random against the lofty and penetrating spirituality in which he had indulged when ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... myself to no one but the Pope himself,' he replied, 'and the interview must take place when and where I please to appoint. Let him meet me this very midnight, and alone, in the fifth chamber of the Appartamento Borgia.' ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... past. But in these enlightened times, when the souls of men have shaken off the fetters of mediaeval bondage, it is difficult to understand how our ancestors could have been so enslaved—worshipping the reigning pope, though even a Borgia, as a very God upon earth. Near the last column of the aisle is a colossal bronze statue of St. Peter, seated on a huge chair or throne. We noticed that every one (Roman Catholic) bowed before the ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux
... colouring, a little cruel when firmly closed, it reminded one irresistibly of that portrait of an unknown gentleman in the Borghese gallery, that profound and mysterious work of art in which the fascinated imagination has sought to recognise the features of the divine Cesare Borgia depicted by the divine Sanzio. As soon as the lips parted in a smile the resemblance vanished, and the square, even dazzlingly white teeth lit up a mouth as fresh and jocund as ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... with so famous a man; and in came, in full armor, a short, bull-necked Italian, evidently of immense strength, of the true Caesar Borgia stamp. ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... fulness of poetic justice, since the chief offender escaped him. While Gourgues was sailing towards Florida, Menendez was in Spain, high in favor at court, where he told to approving ears how he had butchered the heretics. Borgia, the sainted General of the Jesuits, was his fast friend; and two years later, when he returned to America, the Pope, Paul V., regarding him as an instrument for the conversion of the Indians, wrote him a letter with his benediction. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... more be lumped together in level community than men can be. There is an ample variety of tenacious womanly characters between the extremes marked by Miriam beating her timbrels, and Cleopatra applying the asp; Cornelia, caring for nothing but her Roman jewels; Guyon, rapt in God; Lucrezia Borgia raging with bowl and dagger, and Florence Nightingale sweetening the memory of the Crimean war ...
— The Gentleman from Everywhere • James Henry Foss
... words and deeds;" while Langlois and the majority of the scholars of Oxford are of the opinion that the formation and expression of ethical judgments, the approval or condemnation of Julius Caesar or of Caesar Borgia is not a thing within the historian's province. Let the controversy go on! It is well worth one's while to read the presentations of the subject from the different points of view. But infallibility will nowhere be ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes
... the device acquitted Dorothy, according to Garrison's judgment. He doubted if any clever woman, perhaps excepting the famous and infamous Lucrezia Borgia, could have fashioned a plan so utterly ...
— A Husband by Proxy • Jack Steele
... ovation, applause rang through the theatre; the emotion which was evinced by her friends and admirers was evidently shared by herself. The character of Azucena remained a favorite one with Miss Phillips to the last. The characters in which she excelled were Maffio Orsini (Lucrezia Borgia), Rosina (Barber of Seville), and Leonora (Favorita). In 1879, she joined the Ideal Opera Company, and carried into it her vocal and dramatic culture. She continued with this company until December, 1881, when she made her last appearance on any stage in ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 23, October, 1891 • Various
... Sixth, together with his natural son Caesar Borgia, was famous for his wickedness, in which he, and his son too, surpassed all imagination. Their lives are well worth your reading. They were poisoned themselves by the poisoned wine which they had prepared for others; the father died of ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... has been recently discovered by J. Masson (Journal of Philology, xxiii. 46), which was written by Girolamo Borgia in 1502. It gives B.C. 95-51 as the poet's dates. Several new points were supposed to lend it a claim to authority, such as the statement that he was 'matre natus diu sterili.' This, however, has been shown to rest on a wrong reading of Q. Serenus Sammonicus' ...
— The Student's Companion to Latin Authors • George Middleton
... did not yet feel pity for Hilary—for he was angry. Only contempt,—contempt that one who had been a power should come to this. To draw a somewhat far-fetched parallel, a Captain Kidd or a Caesar Borgia with a conscience would never have been heard of. Mr. Flint did not call it a conscience—he had a harder name for it. He had to send Hilary, thus vitiated, into the Convention to conduct the most important battle ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... C every time, and of how the gallery boys would sometimes in their enthusiasm unyoke the horses from the carriage of some great prima donna and pull her themselves through the streets to her hotel. Why did they never play the grand old operas now, he asked, Dinorah, Lucrezia Borgia? Because they could not get the voices to sing ...
— Dubliners • James Joyce
... attend to business, or pleasure, without the slightest discomfort; and this was probably no more than a fair estimate of one of the great constitutions of all time. As a digester, Maurice Levy would have disappointed a Borgia. ...
— Penrod • Booth Tarkington
... spring of the year, in that mountain eyrie beloved of the Muses and coveted of the Borgia, that a little boy stood looking out of a grated casement into the calm, sunshiny day. He was a pretty boy, with hazel eyes, and fair hair cut straight above his brows; he wore a little blue tunic with some embroidery about the throat of it, and had in his ...
— Bimbi • Louise de la Ramee
... in 1833, soon after Hugo's play "Lucrece Borgia" had been accepted for production, that a lady called one morning at Hugo's house in the Place Royale. She was then between twenty and thirty years of age, slight of figure, winsome in her bearing, and one who knew the arts which ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... consent, whether the voice of man do or no. And as Alexander Borgia was wont to say of the expedition of the French for Naples, that they came with chalk in their hands to mark up their lodgings, and not with weapons to fight; so I like better that entry of truth which cometh ...
— The Advancement of Learning • Francis Bacon
... between drawing and colouring, he became a passing good craftsman, as is proved by some pictures that he executed for that lady, which were sent by her to Rome, for Carlo and Giordano Orsini, and which afterwards came into the hands of Caesar Borgia. He made a very good portrait of Madonna Alfonsina from the life; and it seemed to him, on account of his friendship with her, that his fortune was made, when, in the year 1494, Piero de' Medici was banished, and her assistance ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 04 (of 10), Filippino Lippi to Domenico Puligo • Giorgio Vasari
... citizens who obeyed or thwarted them. Houses were sacked and burnt, and occasionally razed to the ground, for the ploughshare and the salt-sower to go over their site. A few years later, when Pope Borgia dredged the Tiber for the body of his son, the boatmen of Ripetta reported that so many bodies were thrown over every night that they no longer heeded such occurrences. And when, two centuries later, ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... doubted that all have a right to join in order to repress, chastise, and put it ever after out of its power to injure them. Such should be the just fruits of the policy which Machiavel praises in Caesar Borgia. The conduct followed by Philip the Second, King of Spain, was adapted to unite all Europe against him; and it was from just reasons that Henry the Great formed the design of humbling a power formidable by its forces and pernicious by its maxims."—Book ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IV. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... less? As much that end a constant course requires Of showers and sunshine, as of man's desires; As much eternal springs and cloudless skies, As men forever temperate, calm, and wise. If plagues or earthquakes break not Heaven's design, Why then a Borgia, or a Catiline? Who knows but He, whose hand the lightning forms, Who heaves old ocean, and who wings the storms; Pours fierce ambition in a Caesar's mind, Or turns young Ammon loose to scourge mankind? From pride, from pride, ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... Henry VIII.; another to advance the startling proposition that the "amazing" but, as the world has heretofore held, infamous Emperor Heliogabalus was a great religious reformer, who was in advance of his times; a third to present Lucrezia Borgia to the world as a much-maligned and very virtuous woman; and a fourth to tell us that the "ever pusillanimous" Barere, as he is called by M. Louis Madelin, was "persistently vilified and deliberately misunderstood." ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... never a more openly profligate Italian despot than Alexander VI (1493-1503) of the notorious Spanish house of Borgia. He frankly set to work to advance the interests of his children, as if he were merely a secular ruler. For one of his sons, Csar Borgia, he proposed to form a duchy east of Florence. Csar outdid his father in crime. He not only entrapped ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... reputation for justice. The barrier is slight, the space short, the transition easy, from one to the other extreme of injustice; and the peasant who voted for the banishment of the just man, in another sphere and under other circumstances, would have been a Borgia or a Catiline. With this feeling in his bosom, Munro was yet unapprized of its existence. It is not with the man, so long hurried forward by his impulses as at last to become their creature, to analyze either their character ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... Muzio beheld Valeria for the first time at a sumptuous popular festival, got up at the command of the Duke of Ferrara, Ercole, son of the famous Lucrezia Borgia, in honour of some distinguished grandees who had arrived from Paris on the invitation of the Duchess, the daughter of Louis XII, King of France. Side by side with her mother sat Valeria in the centre of an elegant tribune, erected after drawings by Palladius on the principal square of Ferrara ...
— A Reckless Character - And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... the persons of the drama are fairly brought upon the stage, the action begins at once; surprise follows surprise, plot is matched by plot, until the fortunes of the actors are entwined inextricably. The portraits of the famous Colonna and of the infamous Caesar Borgia (the latter being the arch "villain" of the story) are drawn in sharp and decisive lines. The tournament which forms the scene of the catastrophe is a brilliant picture, though not a pleasing one for a Friend or a member of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... sons, Pierre and Jean du Lys, demanded the revision.[2703] By this legal artifice the case was converted from a political into a private suit. At this juncture Nicolas V died, on the 24th of March, 1455. His successor, Calixtus III, a Borgia, an old man of seventy-eight, by a rescript dated the 11th of June, 1455, authorised the institution of proceedings. To this end he appointed Jean Jouvenel des Ursins, Archbishop of Reims, Guillaume Chartier, Bishop of Paris, ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... devil produced his master-piece of iniquity in the person of Roderic Borgia, who ascended the Papal throne in 1492 under the name of Alexander VI. The utmost limits assigned to Papal depravity were realized in him, so that the very name Borgia has come to be used as a designation of any person unusually wicked. Says Waddington: "The ecclesiastical records ...
— The Revelation Explained • F. Smith
... Winkle, and in his Yankee characters. (See pages 19, 20, "Specimen Days.") It was here (some years later than the date in the headline) I also heard Mario many times, and at his best. In such parts as Gennaro, in "Lucrezia Borgia," he was inimitable—the sweetest of voices, a pure tenor, of considerable compass and respectable power. His wife, Grisi, was with him, no longer first-class or young—a fine Norma, ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... to is one of the jac-similes of an ancient planisphere, engraved in bronze about the end of the 15th century, and called the Borgian Table, from its possessor, Cardinal Stephen Borgia, and preserved ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... frescoes, has been turned into a manufactory of bricks, and the very Villa Negroni itself is now doomed to be the site of a railway station. Yet here the princely family of Negroni lived, and the very lady at whose house Lucrezia Borgia took her famous revenge may once have sauntered under the walls, which still glow with ripening oranges, to feed the gold-fish in the fountain, or walked with stately friends through the long alleys of clipped cypresses, and pic-nicked alia Giorgione on ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 31, May, 1860 • Various
... that the use of CONFUTATION in the delivery of science, ought to be very sparing; and to serve to remove strong preoccupations and prejudgments, and not to minister and excite disputations and doubts. For he says in another place, 'As Alexander Borgia was wont to say of the expedition of the French for Naples, that they came with chalk in their hands, to mark up their lodgings, and not with weapons to fight, so I like better that entry of truth which cometh peaceably, with chalk ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... that the most inexplicable event of the entire enterprise occurred. Before the party divided some one attempted to poison the Chevalier La Salle. The poison was a subtle and slow one, similar in its effects to those used by the Borgia family; the secret of its manufacture was thought to be unknown out of Italy. Fortunately he had taken an under or overdose of it, and the effects manifested themselves only in a long illness. He was too far on his journey from Fort ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... years. "Since his death was to bring about many calamities," says Niccolo Macchiavelli, "it was the will of Heaven to show this by omens only too certain: the dome of the church of Santa Regarata was struck by lightning, and Roderigo Borgia was elected pope." ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... Jansenist heresy, now purified in the crucible of persecution, have resumed the sound doctrines and the heroic virtues of the apostolic men who will ever be the brightest glory of their land—Thomas of Villa-Nova, Francis Xavier, Ignatius of Loyola, Peter of Alcantara, Francis Borgia, St. John of the Cross, and Saint Theresa. The Holy See, with the concurrence of the Spanish Government, has organized anew the churches of Spain. In the consistory of 3rd July, 1848, Pope Pius IX. instituted bishops ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell
... age, my dear, you were so hard-hearted that you were quite a proverb. Why, I have been told that you used to ask girls dreadful puzzling questions, like 'Who was Caesar Borgia?' 'What do you know of Edwin and ...
— Prince Ricardo of Pantouflia - being the adventures of Prince Prigio's son • Andrew Lang
... Nero himself is dead. When I came out and mounted into my cab, my driver showed me with his whip, beyond a garden wall, a second tower, very beautiful against the blue sky, above the slim cypresses, which he said was the scene of the wicked revels of Lucrezia Borgia. I do not know why it has been chosen for this distinction above other towers; but it was a great satisfaction to have it identified. Very possibly I had seen both of these memorable towers in my former Roman sojourn, but I did not ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... they went to the opera. It was "Lucretia Borgia," and, as usual, Basil Carruthers saw nothing but the stage. In vain did the unwearied colonel call his attention to Lady Evelyn Hope, the lovely blonde; the fascinating Spanish Countess Rosella; to the twin sisters, ...
— The Coquette's Victim • Charlotte M. Braeme
... ruinous, and are among the worst in Italy; and the baronial castle which crowns the highest point,—built nearly a thousand years ago, the scene of many a conflict between the Colonnas and the Orsinis, and captured on one occasion after a twelve days' siege by Caesar Borgia,—has been converted into a barn. The inhabitants of the village do not exceed a hundred in number, and present a haggard and sallow appearance—the effect of the dreadful malaria which haunts the spot. It is strange to contrast this blighted and fever-stricken aspect ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... but by and by I began to remember all the yarns I ever had heard about people getting typhoid fever from polluted well-water, and to imagine that entire household dying on my hands. Remorse with a capital R! I felt like Cesare Borgia and Madame de Brinvilliers and the Veiled Mokanna all rolled into one. When I couldn't stand it any longer, I sneaked into Flavia's room at two o'clock in ...
— From the Car Behind • Eleanor M. Ingram
... and, were they not sincere, I doubt much of his well-being, {47} and, I fear, he was too well seen in the aphorisms and principles of Nicholas the Florentine, and in the reaches {48} of Cesare Borgia. ...
— Travels in England and Fragmenta Regalia • Paul Hentzner and Sir Robert Naunton
... soon as she sees that Ali Higg's pretensions don't amount to a row of shucks I wouldn't give ten piastres for that gentleman's lease of life! Borgia had nothing on her, ...
— The Lion of Petra • Talbot Mundy
... the sewers and sinks With all such drinks, And after them tumble the mixer; For a poison malign Is such Borgia wine, Or at best but ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... Harlowe," with a death-scene of Rose Cheri which comes back to me, through the distance of time, as the prettiest piece of pure and gentle stage-pathos in my memory; at the Porte St. Martin "Lucretia Borgia" by Hugo; at the Cirque, scenes of the great revolution, and all the battles of Napoleon; at the Comic Opera, "Gibby"; and at the Palais Royal the usual new-year's piece, in which Alexandre Dumas was ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... fear or despise or loathe life. I have liked to hear that, for it flattered me; but it is none the less false. I love life ... You smile, Lisaveta, and I know why. But I conjure you, do not regard what I am just saying as literature. Do not think of Cesar Borgia or of any drunken philosophy that elevates him to its escutcheon. He is nothing to me, this Cesar Borgia. I have the poorest possible opinion of him, and I shall never in my life understand how men ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... Cleomena in Mrs. Behn's The Young King; later in the autumn, Laura Lucretia in The Feign'd Curtezans; in October, Bellamira, the heroine of Lee's excellent if flamboyant tragedy, Caesar Borgia, to the Borgia of Betterton and Smith's Machiavel. In 1680 her roles were Arviola in Tate's The Loyal General; Julia in Lawrence Maidwell's capital comedy, The Loving Enemies; Queen Margaret in Crowne's The Misery of Civil War, a version of 2 Henry VI. ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. II • Aphra Behn
... age of Cesare Borgia revolted against this philosophy and the name of Machiavelli became a byword. "Am I a Machiavel?" says the host in The Merry Wives of Windsor, and the implication of this question indirectly manifests the revolt of the seventeenth century against the sinister philosophy of the ...
— The Evidence in the Case • James M. Beck
... was surrounded by decay, dusty desolation, the barrenness of a poverty that is drearier than any of the poverty of the poor; but so might have looked Madama Lucrezia in those old days when the Borgia was God's vicegerent. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... he was permitted to roam at large. But the putting him to death in cold blood, by lingering tortures of mind, by vexations, insults, and deprivations, was a degree of inhumanity to which the poisonings and assassinations of the school of Borgia and the den of Marat never attained. The book proves, also, that nature had denied him the moral sense, the first excellence of well-organized man. If he could seriously and repeatedly affirm, that he had raised himself to power without ever having committed ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... holding the office of Secretary in the second Chancery of the Signoria, which office he retained till the downfall of the Florentine Republic in 1512. His unusual ability was soon recognized, and in 1500 he was sent on a mission to Louis XII. of France, and afterward on an embassy to Caesar Borgia, the lord of Romagna, at Urbino. Machiavelli's report and description of this and subsequent embassies to this prince, shows his undisguised admiration for the courage and cunning of Caesar, who was a master in the application of the principles afterwards exposed in ...
— History Of Florence And Of The Affairs Of Italy - From The Earliest Times To The Death Of Lorenzo The Magnificent • Niccolo Machiavelli
... explained. "Cabinet Ministers, Secretaries of State, the whole machinery of government shall writhe under the barbed shafts of my mockery. Ridicule is the power of the age. Ridicule in my hands shall be as bayonets to NAPOLEON, as poison to a BORGIA." ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, March 11, 1914 • Various
... succeeded by his son. Piero dei Medici sent the preacher away from the city, for he knew that men whispered among themselves that the Dominican had foretold truly the death of Innocent and the parlous state of Florence under the {45} new Pope, Alexander VI (Alexander Borgia). He did not like the predictions of evil for his own house of Medici, which had now wielded supreme power in Florence for over sixty years. It would go hardly with him if the people were to rise against the tyranny ...
— Heroes of Modern Europe • Alice Birkhead
... Card. Borgia has proved (De Cruce Vaticana) this ceremony was performed in S. Peter's on good Friday. In other churches there were two distinct observances; 1. that of stripping the altars on holy Thursday, when Christ's passion began; and 2. that of washing them with wine and on good ...
— The Ceremonies of the Holy-Week at Rome • Charles Michael Baggs
... left Rome for Florence in 1486, Pinturicchio remained there, obtained commissions from the great families of the Della Rovere and Cibo, and from the Borgia Pope Alexander VI., for whom he decorated the famous "Appartamento Borgia" within the Vatican. He thus began to assume the position of an independent master; but if we trace his hand (especially in the children and landscape backgrounds) in the two Sistine ...
— Perugino • Selwyn Brinton
... says somewhere, "so full of meaning, yet so wonderfully strange—Caesar Borgia become pope! Do you understand? Ah, that would verily have been the triumph for which I am longing to-day. Then Christianity would have been done for." And Nietzsche goes on to accuse Luther of having spoiled this lovely possibility, ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... world and would be a clod when no longer living—her essence would remain to inspirit some other evil woman—the same malignity in a beautiful shape which appeared in Lais, Messalina, Lucrezia Borgia, the Medici, Ninon, Lecouvreur, Iza, not links of a chain, but the same gem, a ...
— The Son of Clemenceau • Alexandre (fils) Dumas
... the crime of an instant, an action into which he is hurried by unexpected temptation, and the momentary violence of passion. He goes about it with deliberation. He lays his plans with all the subtlety of a Machiavel, and all the flagitiousness of a Borgia. He executes them gradually from day to day, and from week to week. And during all this time he dwells upon the luxurious idea, he riots in the misery he hopes to create. He will tell you he loves. Yes, he loves, as the hawk loves the harmless dove, as the tyger loves the trembling kid. ...
— Italian Letters, Vols. I and II • William Godwin
... she-devil who has taken a fancy to Will," said Fred with a grin, "is capable of more atrocities than all the Turks between here and Stamboul! She looks to me like Santanita, Cleopatra, Salome, Caesar's wife, and all the Borgia ladies rolled in one. There's something added, though, ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... Leonardo's history is the history of his art; he himself is lost in the bright cloud of it. The outward history begins again in 1502, with a wild journey through central Italy, which he makes as the chief engineer of Caesar Borgia. The biographer, putting together the stray jottings of his manuscripts, may follow him through every day of it, up the strange tower of Sienna, which looks towards Rome, elastic like a bent bow, down to the ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... She commissioned him to paint some pictures for her to send as a present to her own family, the Orsini of Rome. These works, of which the subjects are not known, passed afterwards into the possession of Casar Borgia. She also sat to Mariotto for her own portrait. It is easily imagined how elated the excitable youth became at this notice from the mother of the magnificent Lorenzo. He had dreams of making a greater name than even his master, Cosimo, ...
— Fra Bartolommeo • Leader Scott (Re-Edited By Horace Shipp And Flora Kendrick)
... covetous, and passionate nobleman, was changed into a saint, by casually reading the life of St. Mary of Egypt.[12] The duke of Joyeuse, marshal of France, owed his perfect conversion to the reading of the life of St. Francis Borgia, which his servant had one evening laid on the table. To these the example of St. Ignatius of Loyola, and innumerable others might be added. Dr. Palafox, the pious Binni of Osma, in his preface to the fourth tome of the letters of St. Teresa, relates, that an eminent Lutheran minister at Bremen, ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... days—has kept her divided, torn by civil wars, conquered and reconquered by foreign invaders. Unable, as a celibate ecclesiastic, to form his dominions into a strong hereditary kingdom; unable, as the hierophant of a priestly caste, to unite his people in the bonds of national life; unable, as Borgia tried to do, to conquer the rest of Italy for himself; and form it into a kingdom large enough to have weight in the balance of power; the Pope has been forced, again and again, to keep himself on his throne by intriguing with foreign princes, and ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... turning over several leaves of his notebook, he rattled out the following names: "Alcibiades, kind of statesman; Beau Brummel, fop; Cagliostro, conjurer; Robespierre, politician; Charles Stuart, Pretender; Warwick, King-maker; Borgia, A., Pope; Ditto, C., toxicologist; Wallenstein, mercenary; Bacon, Roger, man of science; Ditto, F., dishonest official; Tell, W., patriot; Jones, Paul, pirate; Lucullus, glutton; Simon Stylites, eccentric; Casanova, loose liver; Casabianca, cabin-boy; Chicot, jester; Sayers, T., ...
— Orpheus in Mayfair and Other Stories and Sketches • Maurice Baring
... he did not experience. The object of art is to fill up what is missing in the artist's experience: "Art begins where life leaves off," said Wagner. A man of action is rarely pleased with stimulating works of art. Borgia and Sforza patronised Leonardo. The strong, full-blooded men of the seventeenth century; the apoplectic court at Versailles (where Fagon's lancet played so necessary a part); the generals and ministers who harassed the Protestants ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... must be the passionate energy of those who would prevail against it. And through my brain there coursed reminiscences of the past history of Italy, with its contrasts of strange levity and dark purpose. Backward and forward my thoughts swayed, from Brutus to Orsini, from Catiline to Caesar Borgia, from Lucullus to Leo X., from Savonarola to Garibaldi. Meanwhile the company got itself in motion, the banners streamed out, loud-voiced street-vendors offered for sale leaflets and pamphlets containing accounts ...
— Captain Mansana and Mother's Hands • Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson
... because her uncle happens to occupy a position of legal eminence, couldn't possibly commit a crime. You're entirely wrong. Some of the greatest women criminals the world has ever seen have been the nieces of men of high position. Look at Lucrezia Borgia, for instance. Her uncle was a Pope; and whatever our religious opinions may be we must admit that a Pope is a bigger man than an ordinary judge, and yet Lucrezia is famous for some of the most remarkable ...
— The Simpkins Plot • George A. Birmingham
... retort of a great author too conscious of his own views to be angry with his critic! The singular phrase of the lodgings chalked up is a sarcasm explained by this passage in "The Advancement of Learning." "As Alexander Borgia was wont to say of the expedition of the French for Naples, that they came with chalk in their hands to mark up their lodgings, and not with weapons to fight; so I like better that entry of truth that cometh peaceably with chalk to mark up those minds which are capable to ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... Borgia, supreme from birth [Ep. 3. As loveliest born on earth Since earth bore ever women that were fair; Scarce known of her own house If daughter or sister or spouse; Who holds men's hearts yet helpless with her hair; The direst of divine things made, Bows down her amorous aureole ...
— Songs of the Springtides and Birthday Ode - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne—Vol. III • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... dramatic literature—on two French dramas of great celebrity—La Marechale d'Ancre, by de Vigny; and Marion Delorme, by Victor Hugo. We quote a scene from the former. Concini, the principal character, is a favourite of Louis XIII.; the Marechale, his wife, has a first love, Borgia, a Corsican, who, disappointed in his early suit by the stratagems of Concini, has married the beautiful but uncultivated Isabella Monti. On the conflicting feelings of this strange personage, his hatred to the husband, and his relenting towards the wife; and the licentious plans ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 19, No. 535, Saturday, February 25, 1832. • Various
... centuries been experts in secret assassination. The Doges of Venice, the Borgias, and the Medici have all had secret poisoners in their pay. The gay, careless race which laughs when the sun shines, are just the same to-day, after the war, as they were in the days of His Holiness Rodrigo Borgia. To-day your superstitious Italian criminal enters the church and prays to the Madonna that his coup—whatever it may be, from profiteering, picking pockets, or the secret assassination of an enemy—may ...
— The Stretton Street Affair • William Le Queux
... of Flies, reported that he saw this spirit come to take possession of him. M. de Langier, a French minister, who employed many spies, was frequently accused of diabolical communication. Sixtus the Fifth, Marechal Faber, Roger Bacon, Caesar Borgia, his son Alexander VI., and others, like Socrates, ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... who had had leisure to think of such things, and physicians to give names to them, would have been called monomania; so haunting, so incessant, were the thoughts that pressed upon him. I have somewhere read a forcibly described punishment among the Italians, worthy of a Borgia. The supposed or real criminal was shut up in a room, supplied with every convenience and luxury; and at first mourned little over his imprisonment. But day by day he became aware that the space between ...
— Mary Barton • Elizabeth Gaskell
... will not seek to interfere with the sacred activities of the pick-pocket, the forger, the sweater, the roue, every one of whom may plead that he is but carrying out the Divine ordinances; if Alexander Borgia's perjuries, poisonings and debaucheries "break not Heaven's design," but are "ordained of God for some purpose," morality itself ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... remarked coolly. "If any one settled down seriously to try and understand my father, he would need the spectacles of a De Quincey, the outlook of a Voltaire, and the callousness of a Borgia. You see, he doesn't lend himself to ...
— The Evil Shepherd • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Brigham, mounted him bareback and started after the game, being armed with my new buffalo killer which I had named "Lucretia Borgia," an improved breech-loading needle-gun which I ...
— An Autobiography of Buffalo Bill (Colonel W. F. Cody) • Buffalo Bill (William Frederick Cody)
... habit of thinking and betray a levity, indeed, licentiousness, ill according with a religious turn of mind, rose to the position of a great dignitary of the Church and a powerful arbiter of the destinies of his kind. As that was an age when Alexander VI. was a Pope, and Lucretia Borgia the daughter of a Pontiff and consort of a reigning Duke of Italy, we can readily credit the author of the Annals, and laud him for admirable, life-like portraiture, when he says that a character and conduct, such as Piso's, "met with the approbation of a large ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... Bedivere, the last of all Arthurian knights; Henry V. is the first as certainly as he is the noblest of those equally daring and calculating statesmen-warriors whose two most terrible, most perfect, and most famous types are Louis XI. and Caesar Borgia. Gain, "commodity," the principle of self-interest which never but in word and in jest could become the principle of action with Faulconbridge,—himself already far more "a man of this world" than a Launcelot or a Hotspur,—is ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... Calixte. These names are of less interest. Calixte was Pope Calixtus III, Alphonso Borgia, who died in 1458—in Villon's twenty-sixth year. Alphonse is Alphonso V of Arragon, who died in that same year. The Duc de Bourbon is Charles the First of Bourbon, who died at the end of the year 1456, "gracieux" because his son protected Villon. Artus (Arthur) ...
— Avril - Being Essays on the Poetry of the French Renaissance • H. Belloc
... occupied with events arising out of the ambitions of Pope Alexander VI and his son, Cesare Borgia, the Duke Valentino, and these characters fill a large space of "The Prince." Machiavelli never hesitates to cite the actions of the duke for the benefit of usurpers who wish to keep the states they have seized; he can, indeed, find no precepts to offer so good as the ...
— The Prince • Niccolo Machiavelli
... considerable length when growing upon rock ledges so as to become pendent. The specimens of C. setispinus from San Julio Canyon are from younger parts and show but a single long and hooked central. The San Borgia specimens show mostly 3 or 4 centrals, the lowest one hooked and becoming remarkably long and often variously twisted and curved. However, I can discover no difference except such as may be ...
— The North American Species of Cactus, Anhalonium, and Lophophora • John M. Coulter
... trust[53] him, and only not scorns his enemy, especially if as bad as himself: he fears him as a man well armed and provided, but sets boldly on good natures, as the most vanquishable. One that seriously admires those worst princes, as Sforza, Borgia, and Richard the third; and calls matters of deep villany things of difficulty. To whom murders are but resolute acts, and treason a business of great consequence. One whom two or three countries make up to this compleatness, and he has travelled for ...
— Microcosmography - or, a Piece of the World Discovered; in Essays and Characters • John Earle
... window, going through sash and all, and then remarks with the most childlike simplicity that he "was not scared, but was considerably agitated." It puts us out of patience to note that the simpleton is densely unconscious that Lucrezia Borgia ever existed off the stage. He is vulgarly ignorant of all foreign languages, but is frank enough to criticize, the Italians' use of their own tongue. He says they spell the name of their great painter "Vinci, but pronounce it Vinchy"—and then adds with ...
— The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories • Mark Twain
... Although a man of no high intellectual abilities, he had received a thorough training in the Macchiavellian theory of politics,[1191] and, during many years of diplomatic service, had enjoyed a fair opportunity for schooling himself in its practical workings. The son of Lucretia Borgia, the grandson of Pope Alexander the Sixth, could scarcely help being an adept at intrigue. Next to this special qualification, his highest recommendations were that he was the brother-in-law of Renee of France, and so by marriage uncle of the Duke of Guise; and that he had twelve good reasons for ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... timid, obstinate yet fickle, always in a hurry, yet always too late; the fierce and haughty energy which gave dignity to the eccentricities of Julius; the soft and graceful manners which masked the insatiable ambition and the implacable hatred of Caesar Borgia. ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... used of deeds of unusual horror; enormousness, of things of unusual size. We speak of the enormity of CA|sar Borgia's crimes, of the ...
— Practical Exercises in English • Huber Gray Buehler
... marriage of her mother, which now he certified upon the holy cross, and charged Father Francesco to make known to one of that kin whom he named. He further informed him, that this family, having fallen under the displeasure of the Pope and his son, Caesar Borgia, had been banished from the city, and their property confiscated, so that there was none of them to be found thereabouts except an aged widowed sister, who, having married into a family in favor with the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IX., March, 1862., No. LIII. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics, • Various
... as soon as she could collect her scattered senses, recognized in Agostino the banished lord of the Sarelli family, a race who had shared with her own the hatred and cruelty of the Borgia tribe; and he in turn had recognized a daughter ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... Caligula, Alexander Borgia, and Robespierre, whose highest enjoyment consisted in witnessing the agonies of their fellow-men, were full of delicate sensibilities and great ...
— The Book of Were-Wolves • Sabine Baring-Gould
... his stay at Florence, painted the portrait of Ginevra Benci, the reigning beauty of her time. We find that in 1502 he was engaged by Caesar Borgia to visit and report on the fortifications of his territories, and in this office he was employed for two years. In 1503 he formed a plan for turning the course of the Arno, and in the following year he lost his father. In 1505 he modelled the group which we now ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... his enemy, especially if as bad as himself: he fears him as a man well armed and provided, but sets boldly on good natures, as the most vanquishable. One that seriously admires those worst princes, as Sforza, Borgia, and Richard the Third; and calls matters of deep villany things of difficulty. To whom murders are but resolute acts, and treason a business of great consequence. One whom two or three countries make up to this completeness, and he has travelled ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... The rule of Borgia's successor, Pius III., lasting only twenty-seven days, afforded little opportunity to the play of indignant wit; but the nine years' reign of Julius II., which followed, was a period whose troubled history ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... justice arrives in less than forty-eight hours by the Oriental Express. Divorce is our weapon of precision, and every pack of cards at the gaming table can distil a poison more destructive than that of the Borgia. The unities of time and place are preserved by wire and rail in a way which would have delighted the hearts of the old French tragics. Perhaps men seek dramatic situations in their own lives less readily since they have found out means of making ...
— Don Orsino • F. Marion Crawford |
