Page:Machiavelli, Romanes Lecture, 2 June 1897.djvu/20

16 to a friend just before his death, and one view of Machiavelli is that he was always the lion masquerading in the fox's skin, an impassioned patriot, under all his craft and jest and bitter mockery. Even Mazzini, who explained the ruin of Italy by the fact that Machiavelli prevailed over Dante, admits that he had 'a profoundly Italian heart.' In 1527 he died.

Machiavelli's active life, then, was passed in council-chambers, camps, courts; he pondered over what he had seen in the light of the few books that he had read,—Livy, Polybius, Tacitus, some portion of Aristotle's Politics, Dante, Petrarch. Nobody borrowed more, and yet few are more original. If he had ever read Thucydides, he would have recalled that first great chapter in European literature, still indeed the greatest in its kind, of reflections on a revolution, where with incomparable insight and fidelity the historian analyses the demoralisation of the Hellenic world, as it lay a prey to intestine faction and the ruinous invocation of foreign aid. These terrible calamities, says Thucydides,15 always have been and always will be, while human nature remains the same. Words cease to have the same relations to things, and their meanings are changed, to suit the ingenuities of enterprise and the atrocities of revenge. Frantic energy is the quality most valued, and the man of violence is always trusted. That simplicity which is a chief ingredient of a noble nature, is laughed to scorn. Inferior intellects succeed best. Revenge becomes dearer than self-preservation, and men even have a sweeter