ROBERTSON. 299 



courage, of singular skill in conquest and in government, 

 nay, even who have rendered services to mankind, not- 

 withstanding their vices, are set apart to be loaded 

 with obloquy quite just in their instance, but incon- 

 sistent enough with the suppression of all reprobation 

 in other cases of less atrocity, indeed, yet of deep 

 shades of guilt. The Borgia family are proverbial for 

 profligacy and cruelty ; yet both father and son showed 

 talents of the highest order, to which the latter added 

 great bravery, while the family were generous protect- 

 ors of learning, especially of the study of jurisprudence, 

 and do not seem to have misgoverned the people of 

 their states more than others of the same age and coun- 

 try, their violence being exhausted on foreign princes 

 and on their own feudal barons.* Of them, however, all 

 anecdotes without evidence are believed. So the least 

 credible stories of our Richard III. are easily received 

 without proof, and he is universally regarded as a 

 monster living in the habitual commission of murder ; 

 yet his capacity and his courage were universally ad- 

 mitted to be of the very highest order, and his reign 

 conferred great advantages on the jurisprudence of 

 England, while the nobles only, and not the com- 

 munity at large, suffered from his tyranny. Is it not 

 somewhat inconsistent in the same historians who are 

 so hostile to these great bad men that they can discover 

 no merit in them, to be so dazzled by the battles of the 

 Plantagenets and the policy of the Tudors that they 

 can discover no blame in the sanguinary ambition of 



* Livy's character of Hannibal has been, and not unjustly, 

 likened by Hume to Guicciardini's account of Alexander VI. 



