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 subject of the Borgias.

A salted, piquant tale of vice, a ghastly story of moral turpitude and physical corruption, a hair-raising narrative of horrors and abominations--these are the stock-in-trade of the sensation-monger.

With the authenticity of the matters he retails such a one has no concern.