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Updated: June 15, 2025
It shows that he has read out-of-the-way books, like Bodinus "De Republicâ," and fresh ones, like Gladstone's Homer, that he can do justice, with Spinoza, to Machiavelli, and that in letters, at least, he has no narrow prejudices. Its sentences are full of scholarly allusion, and its language glitters continually with pattins of bright gold from Shakspeare.
It is likewise true that he constantly employed craft and deceit and was ready to make use of assassination for political purposes, but this too was in accordance with the temper of the times: lawyers then taught, following the precepts of the famous historian and political philosopher, Machiavelli, that Christian morality is a guide for private conduct rather than for public business, and that "the Prince" may act above the laws in order to promote the public good, and even such famous Protestant leaders as Coligny and William the Silent entered into murder plots.
I find the statement of this ultimate thing, vaguely phrased in Trafford's semi-delirium, presenting another expression of the thought quoted from The New Machiavelli; the conception of humanity as an instrument. "Something trying to exist," he says, something "which isn't substance, doesn't belong to space or time, something stifled and enclosed, struggling to get through."
Yet Machiavelli was led by his study of the past and by his experience of the present to defend these vices, as the necessary qualities of the prince whom he would fain have chosen for the saviour of his country.
Dyer is rather of the opinion, first luminously suggested by Macaulay, that Machiavelli was in earnest, but must not be judged as a political moralist of our time and race would be judged.
"So foolish was he in his own conceit, that he began two stately and magnificent houses," Machiavelli tells us, "one in Florence, the other at Rusciano, not more than a mile away: but that in Florence was greater and more splendid than the house of any other private citizen whatsoever.
Besides the finished study of Machiavelli, and the masterly sketch of our great civil troubles known as the article on Hallam's Constitutional History, he produced much which his mature judgment would willingly have allowed to die, but which had plenty of life in it when it first appeared between the blue and yellow covers.
She defies Paul V in the name of freedom, in the days of Sarpi, as she had defied Innocent III in the name of empire in the days of Dandolo. Hellas still lives, still forms an element, vitalizing and omnipresent, in the life of States and in human destiny. Roman grandeur is not dead whilst Sulla, Tacitus, Montesquieu, Machiavelli survive.
What principally struck our ancestors in the morality of the Italians was the license allowed in sensual indulgences, and the bad faith which tainted all public and private dealings. In respect to the latter point, what has already been said about Machiavelli is enough.
Machiavelli, it is true, had some little doubts about the particular Prince he wanted, whether it was Caesar Borgia of Giuliano or Lorenzo, but a Prince it had to be. Before I saw clearly the differences of our own time I searched my mind for the modern equivalent of a Prince. At various times I redrafted a parallel dedication to the Prince of Wales, to the Emperor William, to Mr.
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