Page:Machiavelli, Romanes Lecture, 2 June 1897.djvu/61

Rh, as I judge, with Dr. Abbott's case, in the preface to his second edition of the Novum Organum (1889), pp. 13-20, and in his excellent short monograph on Bacon (1881), pp. 41-5.

8 Mackintosh reproached Bacon for this way of treating history. Spedding stoutly defends it, rather oddly appealing to the narrative of the New Testament, as an example of the most wicked of all judgments, recounted four times 'without a single indignant comment or a single vituperative expression.'—Works, Spedding and Heath, vol. vi. pp. 8-16.

Bacon says M. made a wise and apt choice of method for government—'namely, discourse upon histories or examples; for knowledge drawn freshly, and in our view, out of particulars, findeth its way best to particulars again; and it hath much greater life in practice when the discourse attendeth upon the example, than when the example attendeth upon the discourse.'

9 Harrington's view is expressed in such a sentence as this: 'Corruption in government is to be read and considered in Machiavel, as diseases in a man's body are to be read and considered in Hippocrates. Neither Hippocrates nor Machiavel introduced diseases into man's body, nor corruption into government which were before their time; and seeing they do but discover them, it must be confessed that so much as they have done, tends not to the increase but to the cure of them, which is the truth of these two authors.'—System of Politics, ch. x.

He elsewhere compares him to one who exposes the tricks of a juggler.

10 E.g. Patriot King, pp. 106, 118. On the Policy of the Athenians, 243.

11 Essays, i. 156; ii. 391, where he remarks that historians have been almost always the friends of virtue, but that the politician is much less scrupulous as to the acts of power.

12 This sentence is Treverret's, L'Italie au 16ième Siècle, i. 179. Sainte-Beuve has a short comparison between the two in Causeries, vii. 67-70. 'Machiavelli attached himself to particular facts, and