happiness the learned Pope dismisses the reader. Had he been able to
see into the future, or been willing to stop and discuss the
consequences of an uncontrolled despotism, one pervading fact would not
have escaped his notice the absence of all guarantee for the future.
Those children, beautiful as angels, carefully and thoroughly educated
as they were, fell victims, when they grew up, to the corruption of a
measureless egotism. Galeazzo Maria (1466-1476), solicitous only of
outward effect, too k pride in the beauty of his hands, in the high
salaries he paid, in the financial credit he enjoyed, in his treasure
of two million pieces of gold, in the distinguished people who
surrounded him, and in the army and birds of chase which he maintained.
He was fond of the sound of his own voice, and spoke well, most
fluently, perhaps, when he had the chance of insulting a Venetian
ambassador. He was subject to caprices, such as having a room painted
with figures in a single night; and, what was worse, to fits of
senseless debauchery and of revolting cruelty to his nearest friends.
To a handful of enthusiasts, he seemed a tyrant too bad to live; they
murdered him, and thereby delivered the State into the power of his
brothers, one of whom, Lodovico il Moro, threw his nephew into prison,
and took the government into his own hands. From this usurpation
followed the French intervention, and the disasters which befell the
whole of Italy.

Lodovico Sforza, called 'il Moro,' the Moor, is the most perfect type
of the despot of that age, and, as a kind of natural product, almost
disarms our moral judgement. Notwithstanding the profound immorality of
the means he employed, he used them with perfect ingenuousness; no o ne
would probably have been more astonished than himself to learn that for
the choice of means as well as of ends a human being is
morally.responsible; he would rather have reckoned it as a singular