[Sidenote:  The Discorsi.]

The Discorsi, printed in Rome by Blado, 1537, are not included in the present edition, as the first English translation did not appear until 1680, when almost the entire works of Machiavelli were published by an anonymous translator in London.  But some account and consideration of their contents is imperative to any review of the Florentine’s political thoughts.  Such Discorsi and Relazioni were not uncommon at the time.  The stronger and younger minds of the Renaissance wearied of discussing in the lovely gardens of the Rucellai the ideas of Plato or the allegories of Plotinus.  The politics of Aristotle had just been intelligibly translated by Leonardo Bruni (1492).  And to-day the young ears and eyes of Florence were alert for an impulse to action.  They saw glimpses, in reopened fields of history, of quarries long grown over where the ore of positive politics lay hid.  The men who came to-day to the Orti Oricellarii were men versed in public affairs, men of letters, historians, poets, living greatly in a great age, with Raphael, Michael Angelo, Ariosto, Leonardo going up and down amongst them.  Machiavelli was now in fair favour with the Medici, and is described by Strozzi as una persona per sorgere (a rising man).  He was welcomed into the group with enthusiasm, and there read and discussed the Discorsi.  Nominally mere considerations upon the First Decade of Livy, they rapidly encircled all that was known and thought of policy and state-craft, old and living.

[Sidenote:  Their Plan.]

Written concurrently with The Prince, though completed later, the Discorsi contain almost the whole of the thoughts and intents of the more famous book, but with a slightly different application. ’The Prince traces the progress of an ambitious man, the Discorsi the progress of an ambitious people,’ is an apt if inadequate criticism.  Machiavelli was not the first Italian who thought and wrote upon the problems of his time.  But he was the first who discussed grave questions in modern language.  He was the first modern political writer who wrote of men and not of man, for the Prince himself is a collective individuality.

‘This must be regarded as a general rule,’ is ever in Machiavelli’s mouth, while Guicciardini finds no value in a general rule, but only in ‘long experience and worthy discretion.’  The one treated of policy, the other of politics.  Guicciardini considered specifically by what methods to control and arrange an existing Government.  Machiavelli sought to create a science, which should show how to establish, maintain, and hinder the decline of states generally conceived.  Even Cavour counted the former as a more practical guide in affairs.  But Machiavelli was the theorist of humanity in politics, not the observer only.  He distinguished the two orders of research.  And, during the Italian Renaissance such distinction was supremely necessary.  With