istranieri.’  Machiavelli had gone as Commissary to the camp of Giacomini before Pisa in August 1505; there the man of action and the man of theory came to an agreement:  both found in the Gonfalonier Soderini a chief of the republic capable of entering into their views.

It must be admitted that the new militia proved ineffectual in the hour of need.  To revive the martial spirit of a nation, enervated by tyranny and given over to commerce, merely by a stroke of genius, was beyond the force of even Machiavelli.  When Prato had been sacked in 1512, the Florentines, destitute of troops, divided among themselves and headed by the excellent but hesitating Piero Soderini, threw their gates open to the Medici.  Giuliano, the brother of Pope Leo, and Lorenzo, his nephew, whose statues sit throned in the immortality of Michael Angelo’s marble upon their tombs in San Lorenzo, disposed of the republic at their pleasure.  Machiavelli, as War Secretary of the anti-Medicean government, was of course disgraced and deprived of his appointments.  In 1513 he was suspected of complicity in the conjuration of Pietropaolo Boscoli and Agostino Capponi, was imprisoned in the Bargello, and tortured to the extent of four turns of the rack.  It seems that he was innocent.  Leo X. released him by the act of amnesty passed upon the event of his assuming the tiara; and Machiavelli immediately retired to his farm near San Casciano.

Since we are now approaching the most critical passage of Machiavelli’s biography, it may be well to draw from his private letters a picture of the life to which this statesman of the restless brain was condemned in the solitude of the country.[1] Writing on December 10 to his friend Francesco Vettori, he says, ’I am at my farm; and, since my last misfortunes, have not been in Florence twenty days.  I rise with the sun, and go into a wood of mine that is being cut, where I remain two hours inspecting the work of the previous day and conversing with the woodcutters, who have always some trouble on hand among themselves or with their neighbors.  When I leave the wood, I proceed to a well, and thence to the place which I use for snaring birds, with a book under my arm—­Dante, or Petrarch, or one of the minor poets, like Tibullus or Ovid.  I read the story of their passions, and let their loves remind me of my own, which is a pleasant pastime for a while.  Next I take the road, enter the inn door, talk with the passers-by, inquire the news of the neighborhood, listen to a variety of matters, and make note of the different tastes and humors of men.  This brings me to dinner-time, when I join my family and eat the poor produce of my farm.  After dinner I go back to the inn, where I generally find the host and a butcher, a miller, and a pair of bakers.  With these companions I play the fool all day at cards or backgammon:  a thousand squabbles, a thousand insults and abusive dialogues take place, while we haggle over a farthing,