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.