end.  Machiavelli and Paolo Giovio, for example, both praise the massacre at Sinigaglia as a masterstroke of art, without uttering a word in condemnation of its perfidy.  Machiavelli sneers at Gianpaolo Baglioni because he had not the courage to strangle his guest Julius II. and to crown his other crimes with this signal act of magnanimity.  What virtue had come to mean in the Italian language we have seen already.  The one quality which every one despised was simplicity, however this might be combined with lofty genius and noble aims.  It was because Soderini was simple and had a good heart that Machiavelli wrote the famous epigram—­

  La notte che mori Pier Soderini
  L’ alma n’ ando dell’ inferno alla bocca;
  E Pluto le grido:  Anima sciocca,
  Che inferno? va nel limbo de’ bambini.

  The night that Peter Soderini died,
  His soul flew down unto the mouth of hell: 
  ‘What?  Hell for you?  You silly spirit!’ cried
  The fiend:  ‘your place is where the babies dwell.’

As of old in Corcyra, so now in Italy, ’guilelessness, which is the principal ingredient of genuine nobleness, was laughed down, and disappeared.’[1] What men feared was not the moral verdict of society, pronouncing them degraded by vicious or violent acts, but the intellectual estimate of incapacity and the stigma of dullness.  They were afraid of being reckoned among feebler personalities; and to escape from this contempt, by the commission even of atrocities, had come to be accounted manly.  The truth, missed almost universally, was that the supreme wisdom, the paramount virility, is law-abiding honesty, the doing of right because right is right, in scorn of consequence.  Nothing appears more clearly in the memoirs of Cellini than this point, while the Italian novels are full of matter bearing on the same topic.  It is therefore ridiculous to assume that an Italian judged of men or conduct in any sense according to our standards.  Pinturicchio and Perugino thought it no shame to work for princes like the Baglioni and for Popes like Alexander VI.  Lionardo da Vinci placed his talents as an engineer at the service of Cesare Borgia, and employed his genius as a musician and a painter for the amusement of the Milanese Court, which must have been, according to Corio’s account, flagrantly and shamelessly corrupt.  Leo Battista Alberti, one of the most charming and the gentlest spirits of the earlier Renaissance, in like manner lent his architectural ability to the vanity of the iniquitous Sigismondo Malatesta.  No:  the Principe was not inconsistent with the general tone of Italian morality; and Machiavelli cannot be fairly taxed with the discovery of a new infernal method.  The conception of politics as a bare art of means to ends had grown up in his mind by the study of Italian history and social customs.  His idealization of Cesare Borgia and his romance of Castruccio were the first products of the theory he had formed by observation of the world he lived in.  The Principe revealed it fully organized.  But to have presented such an essay in good faith to the despots of his native city, at that particular moment in his own career, and under the pressure of trivial distress, is a real blot upon his memory.