Machiavel.—­If you had read my book with candour you would have perceived that I did not desire to render men either tyrants or rebels, but only showed, if they were so, what conduct, in such circumstances, it would be rational and expedient for them to observe.

Guise.—­When you were a minister of state in Florence, if any chemist or physician had published a treatise, to instruct his countrymen in the art of poisoning, and how to do it with the most certain destruction to others and security to themselves, would you have allowed him to plead in his justification that he did not desire men to poison their neighbours?  But, if they would use such evil means of mending their fortunes, there could surely be no harm in letting them know what were the most effectual poisons, and by what methods they might give them without being discovered.  Would you have thought it a sufficient apology for him that he had dropped in his preface, or here and there in his book, a sober exhortation against the committing of murder?  Without all doubt, as a magistrate concerned for the safety of the people of Florence, you would have punished the wretch with the utmost severity, and taken great care to destroy every copy of so pernicious a book.  Yet your own admired work contains a more baneful and more infernal art.  It poisons states and kingdoms, and spreads its malignity, like a general pestilence, over the whole world.

Machiavel.—­You must acknowledge at least that my discourses on Livy are full of wise and virtuous maxims and precepts of government.

Guise.—­This, I think, rather aggravates than alleviates your guilt.  How could you study and comment upon Livy with so acute and profound an understanding, and afterwards write a book so absolutely repugnant to all the lessons of policy taught by that sage and moral historian?  How could you, who had seen the picture of virtue so amiably drawn by his hand, and who seemed yourself to be sensible of all its charms, fall in love with a fury, and set up her dreadful image as an object of worship to princes?

Machiavel.—­I was seduced by vanity.  My heart was formed to love virtue.  But I wanted to be thought a greater genius in politics than Aristotle or Plato.  Vanity, sir, is a passion as strong in authors as ambition in princes, or rather it is the same passion exerting itself differently.  I was a Duke of Guise in the republic of letters.

Guise.—­The bad influences of your guilt have reached further than mine, and been more lasting.  But, Heaven be praised, your credit is at present much declining in Europe.  I have been told by some shades who are lately arrived here, that the ablest statesman of his time, a king, with whose fame the world is filled, has answered your book, and confuted all the principles of it, with a noble scorn and abhorrence.  I am also assured, that in England there is a great and good king, whose whole