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Updated: May 27, 2025
Every one acknowledged it; yet every one continued to live indolently according to the fashion of his forefathers, acting up to Ovid's maxim Pro magna parte vetustas Creditur; acceptam parce movere fidem. It is only this incurable indifference that renders Machiavelli's comic portraits of Fra Alberigo and Fra Timoteo at all intelligible.
But Carlyle has only just ceased to be mistaken for a reformer, while it is still Machiavelli's hard fate to be so trammeled in his material that his name stands for whatever is most malevolent and perfidious in human nature.
Not by making Machiavelli's 'Prince' his study, but by having enjoyed the living instruction of a monarch who reduced the book to practice, had he become versed in the perilous arts by which thrones rise and fall. In him Philip had to deal with an antagonist who was armed against his policy, and who in a good cause could also command the resources of a bad one.
For this society Machiavelli wrote his 'Treatise on the Art of War, and his 'Discourses upon Livy. The former was an exposition of Machiavelli's scheme for creating a national militia, as the only safeguard for Italy, exposed at this period to the invasions of great foreign armies. The latter is one of the three or four masterpieces produced by the Florentine school of critical historians.
The list of books which he read is significant: Coxe's "Travels in Switzerland," Duclos's "Memoirs of the Reigns of Louis XIV and Louis XV," Machiavelli's "History of Florence," Voltaire's "Essay on Manners," Duvernet's "History of the Sorbonne," Le Noble's "Spirit of Gerson," and Dulaure's "History of the Nobility." There exist among his papers outlines more or less complete of all these books.
Yet this is the proper place for explaining my view about Machiavelli's writings in relation to his biography, and for attempting to connect them into such unity as a mind so strictly logical as his may have designed. Macaulay's essay is, of course, brilliant and comprehensive. I do not agree with his theory of the Italian despot, as I have explained on p. 127 of this volume.
Here we have the truth, of course not so intended, but evident: Machiavelli's crime is not for the sentiments he entertained but for writing them down luminously and forcibly in other words, for giving the show away. Think of Macaulay's "horror and amazement," and read this further in the same essay: "Every man who has seen the world knows that nothing is so useless as a general maxim.
Of those double strands it is I have to write, of the subtle protesting perplexing play of instinctive passion and desire against too abstract a dream of statesmanship. But things that seemed to lie very far apart in Machiavelli's time have come near to one another; it is no simple story of white passions struggling against the red that I have to tell.
With the splendid involutions of Machiavelli's and Guicciardini's prose Bacon learned their cool and disimpassioned philosophy.
The whole story may be read in Ripamonti, under the head of 'Confessio Olgiati; in Corio, who was a page of the Duke's and an eye-witness of the murder; and in the seventh book of Machiavelli's 'History. Sismondi's summary and references, vol. vii. pp. 86-90, are very full.
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