successive generations, to contrast the action of individuals with the evolution of causes over which they had but little control, and to bring the salient features of the national biography into relief by the suppression of comparatively unimportant details.  By thus applying the philosophical method to history, Machiavelli enriched the science of humanity with a new department.  There is something in his view of national existence beyond the reach of even the profoundest of the classical historians.  His style is adequate to the matter of his work.  Never were clear and definite thoughts expressed with greater precision in language of more masculine vigor.  We are irresistibly compelled, while characterizing this style, to think of the spare sinews of a trained gladiator.  Though Machiavelli was a poet, he indulges in no ornaments of rhetoric.[3] His images, rare and carefully chosen, seem necessary to the thoughts they illustrate.  Though a philosopher, he never wanders into speculation.  Facts and experience are so thoroughly compacted with reflection in his mind, that his widest generalizations have the substance of realities.  The element of unreality, if such there be, is due to a misconception of human nature.  Machiavelli seems to have only studied men in masses, or as political instruments, never as feeling and thinking personalities.

    [1] See Varchi, loc. cit.

    [2] See the criticisms of Ammirato and Romagnosi, quoted by
    Cantu, Letteratura Italiana, p. 187.

    [3] I shall have to speak elsewhere of Machiavelli’s comedies,
    occasional poems, novel of ‘Belphegor,’ etc.

Machiavelli, according to the letter addressed by his son Pietro to Francesco Nelli, died of a dose of medicine taken at the wrong time.  He was attended on his deathbed by a friar, who received his confession.  His private morality was but indifferent.  His contempt for weakness and simplicity was undisguised.  His knowledge of the world and men had turned to cynicism.  The frigid philosophy expressed in his political Essays, and the sarcastic speeches in which he gave a vent to his soured humors, made him unpopular.  It was supposed that he had died with blasphemy upon his lips, after turning all the sanctities of human nature into ridicule.  Through these myths, as through a mist, we may discern the bitterness of that great, disenchanted, disappointed soul.  The desert in which spirits of the stamp of Machiavelli wander is too arid and too aerial for the gross substantial bugbears of the vulgar conscience to inhabit.  Moreover, as Varchi says, ’In his conversation Machiavelli was pleasant, serviceable to his friends, a friend of virtuous men, and, in a word, worthy of having received from nature either less genius or a better mind.’

CHAPTER VI.

‘THE PRINCE’ OF MACHIAVELLI.