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Updated: June 22, 2025
And if Machiavel, averse from doing this commonwealth right, had considered her orders, as his reader shall easily perceive he never did, he must have been so far from attributing the prudence of them to chance, that he would have touched up his admirable work to that perfection which, as to the civil part, has no pattern in the universal world but this of Venice.
Barnabe Riche inserted it in his collection of narratives in 1581, and we meet it again later in the following plays: Grim, the Collier of Croydon, ascribed to Ulpian Fulwell ; The Devil and his Dame by P. M. Houghton ; Machiavel and the Devil by Daborne and Henslowe ; The Devil is an Ass by Ben Jonson ; and Belphagor, or the Marriage of the Devil . In France the story was treated in verse by La Fontaine , and in Germany it served the Nuremberg poet Hans Sachs as the subject for a farce .
In extenuation of a departure from these political maxims it may be urged, that the french excited the war, and that in the pursuit of it, they displayed a compound spirit, which Machiavel might well think problematical, for whilst that country never averted its eye from the common enemy, it never ceased to groan under the inflictions of unremitting factions.
Between the Countess herself, serious or dissembling for one hardly knows how to apprehend this fantastical great lady and the practices of that delicious little piece of mischief, Maria The lime twigs laid By Machiavel the waiting maid the man might well be rapt into a fool's paradise. Bensley threw over the part an air of Spanish loftiness. He looked, spake, and moved like an old Castilian.
With a mind naturally alive to honour, he yet conceived the design of taking in hand the "doctrine of the murderous Machiavel;" and displays, broadly and didactically, all the knowledge which he had acquired of these arts. He had no suspicion that a remorseless and selfish policy goes always smoothly to work, and dexterously disguises itself.
It is not the Grand Duke of Tuscany who claims this declaration, not the Grand Duke, who for his early sincerity, for his love of peace, and for his entire confidence in the amity of the assassins of his house, has been complimented in the British Parliament with the name of "the wisest sovereign in Europe": it is not this pacific Solomon, or his philosophic, cudgelled ministry, cudgelled by English and by French, whose wisdom and philosophy between them have placed Leghorn in the hands of the enemy of the Austrian family, and driven the only profitable commerce of Tuscany from its only port: it is not this sovereign, a far more able statesman than any of the Medici in whose chair he sits, it is not the philosopher Carletti, more ably speculative than Galileo, more profoundly politic than Machiavel, that call upon us so loudly to give the same happy proofs of the same good faith to the republic always the same, always one and indivisible.
In which words Verulamius, as Machiavel has done before him, harps much upon a string which he has not perfectly tuned, and that is, the balance of dominion or property, as it follows more plainly, in his praise "of the profound and admirable device of Panurgus, King of Oceana, in making farms and houses of husbandry of a standard; that is, maintained with such a proportion of land to them as may breed a subject to live in convenient plenty, and no servile condition, and to keep the plough in the hands of the owners, and not mere hirelings.
The squire, though perhaps he had never read Machiavel, was, however, in many points, a perfect politician. He strongly held all those wise tenets, which are so well inculcated in that Politico-Peripatetic school of Exchange-alley. He knew the just value and only use of money, viz., to lay it up.
"My lords, if I have argued well, I have given you the comfort and assurance that, notwithstanding the judgment of Machiavel, your commonwealth is both safe and sound; but if I have not argued well, then take the comfort and assurance which he gives you while he is firm, that a legislator is to lay aside all other examples, and follow that of Rome only, conniving and temporizing with the enmity between the Senate and the people as a necessary step to the Roman greatness.
As for the observation that Machiavel hath, that the jealousy of sects, doth much extinguish the memory of things; traducing Gregory the Great, that he did what in him lay, to extinguish all heathen antiquities; I do not find that those zeals do any great effects, nor last long; as it appeared in the succession of Sabinian, who did revive the former antiquities.
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