Macaulay’s brilliant description of the Italian tyrant in his essay on Machiavelli deserves careful study.  It may, however, be remarked that the picture is too favorable.  Macaulay omits the darker crimes of the despots, and draws his portrait almost exclusively from such men as Gian Galeazzo Visconti, Francesco and Lodovico Sforza, Frederick of Urbino, and Lorenzo de’ Medici.  The point he is seeking to establish—­that political immorality in Italy was the national correlative to Northern brutality—­leads him to idealize the polite refinement, the disciplined passions, the firm and astute policy, the power over men, and the excellent government which distinguished the noblest Italian princes.  When he says ’Wanton cruelty was not in his nature:  on the contrary, where no political object was at stake, his disposition was soft and humane’; he seems to have forgotten Gian Maria Visconti, Corrado Trinci, Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta, and Cesare Borgia.  When he writes, ’His passions, like well-trained troops, are impetuous by rule, and in their most headstrong fury never forget the discipline to which they have been accustomed,’ he leaves Francesco Maria della Rovere, Galeazzo Maria Sforza, Pier Luigi Farnese, Alexander VI., out of the reckoning.  If all the despots had been what Macaulay describes, the revolutions and conspiracies of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries would not have taken place.  It is, however, to be remarked that in the sixteenth century the conduct of the tyrant toward his subjects assumed an external form of mildness.  As Italy mixed with the European nations, and as tyranny came to be legalized in the Italian states, the despots developed a policy not of terrorism but of enervation (Lorenzo de’ Medici is the great example), and aspired to be paternal governors.

What I have said about Italian despotism is no mere fancy picture.  The actual details of Milanese history, the innumerable tragedies of Lombardy, Romagna, and the Marches of Ancona, during the ascendency of despotic families, are far more terrible than any fiction; nor would it be easy for the imagination to invent so perplexing a mixture of savage barbarism with modern refinement.  Savonarola’s denunciations[1] and Villani’s descriptions of a despot read like passages from Plato’s Republic, like the most pregnant of Aristotle’s criticisms upon tyranny.  The prologue to the sixth book of Matteo Villani’s Chronicle may be cited as a fair specimen of the judgment passed by contemporary Italian thinkers upon their princes (Libro Sesto, cap. i.):  ’The crimes of despots always hinder and often neutralize the virtues of good men.  Their pleasures are at variance with morality.  By them the riches of their subjects are swallowed up.  They are foes to men who grow in wisdom and in greatness of soul in their dominions.  They diminish by their imposts the wealth of the peoples ruled by them.  Their unbridled lust is never satiated, but their subjects have to suffer such outrages and insults