Machiavel.—­I the cause of your death!  You surprise me!

Guise.—­Yes.  Your pernicious maxims of policy, imported from Florence with Catherine of Medicis, your wicked disciple, produced in France such a government, such dissimulation, such perfidy, such violent, ruthless counsels, as threw that whole kingdom into the utmost confusion, and ended my life, even in the palace of my sovereign, by the swords of assassins.

Machiavel.—­Whoever may have a right to complain of my policy, you, sir, have not.  You owed your greatness to it, and your deviating from it was the real cause of your death.  If it had not been for the assassination of Admiral Coligni and the massacre of the Huguenots, the strength and power which the conduct of so able a chief would have given to that party, after the death of your father, its most dangerous enemy, would have been fatal to your house; nor could you, even with all the advantage you drew from that great stroke of royal policy, have acquired the authority you afterwards rose to in the kingdom of France; but by pursuing my maxims, by availing yourself of the specious name of religion to serve the secret purposes of your ambition, and by suffering no restraint of fear or conscience, not even the guilt of exciting a civil war, to check the necessary progress of your well-concerted designs.  But on the day of the barricades you most imprudently let the king escape out of Paris, when you might have slain or deposed him.  This was directly against the great rule of my politics, not to stop short in rebellion or treason till the work is fully completed.  And you were justly censured for it by Pope Sixtus Quintus, a more consummate politician, who said, “You ought to have known that when a subject draws his sword against his king he should throw away the scabbard.”  You likewise deviated from my counsels, by putting yourself in the power of a sovereign you had so much offended.  Why would you, against all the cautions I had given, expose your life in a loyal castle to the mercy of that prince?  You trusted to his fear, but fear, insulted and desperate, is often cruel.  Impute therefore your death not to any fault in my maxims, but to your own folly in not having sufficiently observed them.

Guise.—­If neither I nor that prince had ever practised your maxims in any part of our conduct, he would have reigned many years with honour and peace, and I should have risen by my courage and talents to as high a pitch of greatness as it consisted with the duty of a subject to desire.  But your instructions led us on into those crooked paths, out of which there was no retreat without great danger, nor a possibility of advancing without being detested by all mankind, and whoever is so has everything to fear from that detestation.  I will give you a proof of this in the fate of a prince, who ought to have been your hero instead of Caesar Borgia, because he was incomparably a greater man, and, of all who