in studying statecraft have not been wasted in sleep or play; and everybody ought to be glad to make use of a man who has so filled himself with experience at the expense of others.  About my fidelity they ought not to doubt.  Having always kept faith, I am not going to learn to break it now.  A man who has been loyal and good for forty-three years, like me, is not likely to change his nature; and of my loyalty and goodness my poverty is sufficient witness to them.’

[1] Compare the letter, dated June 10, 1514, to Fr. Vettori:  ’Starommi dunque cosi tra i miei cenci, senza trovare uomo che della mia servitu si ricordi, o che creda che io possa esser buono a nulla.  Ma egli e impossibile che io possa star molto cosi, perche io mi logoro,’ etc.  Again, Dec. 20, 1514:  ’E se la fortuna avesse voluto che i Medici, o in cosa di Firenze o di fuora, o in cose loro particolari o in pubbliche, mi avessino una volta comandato, io sarei contento.’

This letter, invaluable to the student of Machiavelli’s works, is prejudicial to his reputation.  It was written only ten months after he had been imprisoned and tortured by the Medici, just thirteen months after the republic he had served so long had been enslaved by the princes before whom he was now cringing.  It is true that Machiavelli was not wealthy; his habits of prodigality made his fortune insufficient for his needs.[1] It is true that he could ill bear the enforced idleness of country life, after being engaged for fifteen years in the most important concerns of the Florentine Republic.  But neither his poverty, which, after all, was but comparative, nor his inactivity, for which he found relief in study, justifies the tone of the conclusion to this letter.  When we read it, we cannot help remembering the language of another exile, who while he tells us—­

                Come sa di sale
  Lo pane altrui, e com’ e duro calle
  Lo scendere e ‘l salir per l’ altrui scale

—­can yet refuse the advances of his factious city thus:  ’If Florence cannot be entered honorably, I will never set foot within her walls.  And what?  Shall I not be able from any angle whatsoever of the earth to gaze upon the sun and stars? shall I not beneath whatever region of the heavens have power to meditate the sweetest truths, unless I make myself ignoble first, nay ignominious, in the face of Florence and her people?  Nor will bread, I warrant, fail me!’ If Machiavelli, who in this very letter to Vettori quoted Dante, had remembered these words, they ought to have fallen like drops of molten lead upon his soul.  But such was the debasement of the century that probably he would have only shrugged his shoulders and sighed, ‘Tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis.’

    [1] See familiar letter, June 10, 1514.