vincit Impetus, et rapido contrarius evehor orbi." a stupefied people to the seat of en- | bated as criminal, or derided as parachantment, was the noble aim of Mil-doxical. He stood up for divorce and ton. To this all his public conduct regicide. He attacked the prevailing was directed. For this he joined the systems of education. His radiant Presbyterians; for this he forsook and beneficent career resembled that of them. He fought their perilous battle; the god of light and fertility. but he turned away with disdain from "Nitor in adversum; nec me, qui cætera, their insolent triumph. He saw that they, like those whom they had vanquished, were hostile to the liberty of thought. He therefore joined the Independents, and called upon Cromwell to break the secular chain, and to save free conscience from the paw of the Presbyterian wolf. With a view to the same great object, he attacked the licensing system, in that sublime treatise which every statesman should wear as a sign upon his hand and as frontlets between his eyes. His attacks were, in general, directed less against particular abuses than against those deeply-seated errors on which almost all abuses are founded, the servile worship of eminent men and the irrational dread of innovation. It is to be regretted that the prose writings of Milton should, in our time, be so little read. As compositions, they deserve the attention of every man who wishes to become acquainted with the full power of the English language. They abound with passages compared with which the finest declamations of Burke sink into insignificance. They are a perfect field of cloth of gold. The style is stiff with gorgeous embroidery. Not even in the earlier books of the Paradise Lost has the great poet ever risen higher than in those parts of his controversial works in which his feelings, excited by conflict, find a vent in bursts of devotional and lyric rapture. That he might shake the foundations It is, to borrow his own majestic lanof these debasing sentiments more guage, "a sevenfold chorus of halleeffectually, he always selected for him- lujahs and harping symphonies." self the boldest literary services. He We had intended to look more closely never came up in the rear, when the out-at these performances, to analyse the works had been carried and the breach peculiarities of the diction, to dwell at entered. He pressed into the forlorn some length on the sublime wisdom of hope. At the beginning of the changes, the Areopagitica and the nervous rhehe wrote with incomparable energy and toric of the Iconoclast, and to point out eloquence against the bishops. But, some of those magnificent passages when his opinion seemed likely to pre- which occur in the Treatise of Revail, he passed on to other subjects, and formation, and the Animadversions on abandoned prelacy to the crowd of the Remonstrant. But the length to writers who now hastened to insult a which our remarks have already exfalling party. There is no more hazard-tended renders this impossible. ous enterprise than that of bearing the torch of truth into those dark and infected recesses in which no light has ever shone. But it was the choice and the pleasure of Milton to penetrate the noisome vapours, and to brave the terrible explosion. Those who most disapprove of his opinions must respect the hardihood with which he maintained them. He, in general, left to others the credit of expounding and defending the popular parts of his religious and political creed. He took his own stand upon those which the great body of his countrymen repro We must conclude. And yet we can scarcely tear ourselves away from the subject. The days immediately following the publication of this relic of Milton appear to be peculiarly set apart, and consecrated to his memory. And we shall scarcely be censured it, on this his festival, we be found linger. ing near his shrine, how worthless soever may be the offering which we bring to it. While this book lies on our table, we seem to be contemporaries of the writer. We are transported a hundred and fifty years back. We can almost fancy that we are visit ing him in his small lodging; that we and to heal. They are powerful, not see him sitting at the old organ beneath only to delight, but to elevate and the faded green hangings; that we can purify. Nor do we envy the man who catch the quick twinkle of his eyes, can study either the life or the writings rolling in vain to find the day; that of the great poet and patriot, without we are reading in the lines of his noble aspiring to emulate, not indeed the countenance the proud and mournful sublime works with which his genius history of his glory and his affliction. has enriched our literature, but the zeal We image to ourselves the breathless with which he laboured for the public silence in which we should listen to his good, the fortitude with which he enslightest word, the passionate venera-dured every private calamity, the lofty tion with which we should kneel to kiss disdain with which he looked down ola his hand and weep upon it, the ear- temptations and dangers, the deadly nestness with which we should en-hatred which he bore to bigots and deavour to console him, if indeed such tyrants, and the faith which he so a spirit could need consolation, for the sternly kept with his country and with neglect of an age unworthy of his his fame. talents and his virtues, the eagerness with which we should contest with his daughters, or with his Quaker friend Elwood, the privilege of reading Homer to him, or of taking down the immortal accents which flowed from his lips. These are perhaps foolish feelings. Yet we cannot be ashamed of them; nor shall we be sorry if what we have written shall in any degree excite them in other minds. We are not much in the habit of idolizing either the living or the dead. And we think that there is no more certain indication of a weak and ill-regulated intellect than that propensity which, for want of a better name, we will venture to christen Boswellism. But there are a few characters which have stood the closest scrutiny and the severest tests, which have been tried in the furnace and have proved pure, which have been weighed in the balance and have not been found wanting, which have been declared sterling by the general consent of mankind, and which are visibly stamped with the image and superscription of the Most High. These great men we trust that we know how to prize; and of these was Milton. The sight of his books, the sound of his name, are pleasant to us. His thoughts resemble those celestial fruits and flowers which the Virgin Martyr of Massinger sent down from the gardens of Paradise to the earth, and which were distinguished from the productions of other soils, not only by superior bloom and sweetness, but by miraculous efficacy to invigorate MACHIAVELLI. (March, 1827.) Euvres complètes de MACHIAVEL, traduites par J. V. PERIER. Paris: 1825. THOSE who have attended to the practice of our literary tribunal are well aware that, by means of certain legal fictions similar to those of Westminster Hall, we are frequently enabled to take cognisance of cases lying beyond the sphere of our original jurisdiction. We need hardly say, therefore, that in the present instance M. Périer is merely a Richard Roe, who will not be mentioned in any subsequent stage of the proceedings, and whose name is used for the sole purpose of bringing Machiavelli into court. We doubt whether any name in literary history be so generally odious as that of the man whose character and writings we now propose to consider The terms in which he is commonly described would seem to import that he was the Tempter, the Evil Principle, the discoverer of ambition and revenge, the original inventor of perjury, and that, before the publication of his fatal Prince, there had never been a hypocrite, a tyrant, or a traitor, a simulated virtue, or a convenient crime. writer gravely assures us that Maurice of Saxony learned all his fraudulent policy from that execrable volume. Another remarks that since it was translated into Turkish, the Sultans One have been more addicted than formerly | cision. It is notorious that Machiavelli to the custom of strangling their bro- was, through life, a zealous republican. thers. Lord Lyttelton charges the In the same year in which he compoor Florentine with the manifold trea- posed his manual of King-craft, he sons of the house of Guise, and with suffered imprisonment and torture in the massacre of St. Bartholomew. the cause of public liberty. It seems Several authors have hinted that the inconceivable that the martyr of freeGunpowder Plot is to be primarily dom should have designedly acted as attributed to his doctrines, and seem to the apostle of tyranny. Several emithink that his effigy ought to be sub-nent writers have, therefore, endeastituted for that of Guy Faux, in those voured to detect in this unfortunate processions by which the ingenious performance some concealed meaning, youth of England annually commemo- more consistent with the character and rate the preservation of the Three conduct of the author than that which Estates. The Church of Rome has appears at the first glance. pronounced his works accursed things. Nor have our own countrymen been backward in testifying their opinion of his merits. Out of his surname they have coined an epithet for a knave, and out of his Christian name a synonyme for the Devil.* One hypothesis is that Machiavelli intended to practise on the young Lorenzo de Medici a fraud similar to that which Sunderland is said to have employed against our James the Second, and that he urged his pupil to violent and perfidious measures, as the surest It is indeed scarcely possible for any means of accelerating the moment of person, not well acquainted with the deliverance and revenge. Another suphistory and literature of Italy, to read position which Lord Bacon seems to without horror and amazement the countenance, is that the treatise was celebrated treatise which has brought merely a piece of grave irony, intended so much obloquy on the name of Ma- to warn nations against the arts of chiavelli. Such a display of wicked- ambitious men. It would be easy to ness, naked yet not ashamed, such show that neither of these solutions is cool, judicious, scientific atrocity, seemed consistent with many passages in The rather to belong to a fiend than to the Prince itself. But the most decisive most depraved of men. Principles refutation is that which is furnished which the most hardened ruffian would by the other works of Machiavelli. In scarcely hint to his most trusted ac- all the writings which he gave to the complice, or avow, without the disguise public, and in all those which the reof some palliating sophism, even to search of editors has, in the course of his own mind, are professed without three centuries, discovered, in his Cothe slightest circumlocution, and as-medies, designed for the entertainment sumed as the fundamental axioms of all of the multitude, in his Comments on political science. Livy, intended for the perusal of the It is not strange that ordinary readers most enthusiastic patriots of Florence, should regard the author of such a in his History, inscribed to one of the book as the most depraved and shame- most amiable and estimable of the less of human beings. Wise men, how-Popes, in his public dispatches, in his ever, have always been inclined to look private memoranda, the same obliquity with great suspicion on the angels and of moral principle for which The Prince dæmons of the multitude: and in the present instance, several circumstances have led even superficial observers to question the justice of the vulgar de Nick Machiavel had ne'er a trick, is so severely censured is more or less discernible. We doubt whether it would be possible to find, in all the many volumes of his compositions, a single expression indicating that dissimulation and treachery had ever struck him as discreditable. After this, may seem ridiculous to say that we are acquainted with few for dedicating The Prince to a patron who bore the unpopular name of Medici. But to those immoral doctrines which have since called forth such severe reprehensions no exception appears to have been taken. The cry against them was first raised beyond the Alps, and seems to have been heard with amazement in Italy. The earliest assailant, as far as we are aware, was a countryman of our own, Cardinal Pole. The author of the Anti-Machiavelli was a French Protestant. It is, therefore, in the state of moral feeling among the Italians of those times that we must seek for the real explanation of what seems most mysterious in the life and writings of this remarkable man. As this is a subject which suggests many interesting considerations, both political and metaphysical, we shall make no apology for discussing it at some length. writings which exhibit so much eleva- | Christians. Some members of the detion of sentiment, so pure and warm a mocratical party censured the Secretary zcal for the public good, or so just a view of the duties and rights of citizens, as those of Machiavelli. Yet so it is. And even from The Prince itself we could select many passages in support of this remark. To a reader of our age and country this inconsistency is, at first, perfectly bewildering. The whole man seems to be an enigma, a grotesque assemblage of incongruous qualities, selfishness and generosity, cruelty and benevolence, craft and simplicity, abject villany and romantic heroism. One sentence is such as a veteran diplomatist would scarcely write in cipher for the direction of his most confidential spy; the next seems to be extracted from a theme composed by an ardent schoolboy on the death of Leonidas. An act of dexterous perfidy, and an act of patriotic self-devotion, call forth the same kind and the same degree of respectful admiration. The moral sensibility of the writer seems at once to be morbidly obtuse and morbidly acute. Two characters altogether dissimilar are united in him. They are not merely joined, but interwoven. They are the warp and the woof of his mind; and their combination, like that of the variegated threads in shot silk, gives to the whole texture a glancing and ever-changing appearance. The explanation might have been easy, if he had been a very weak or a very affected man. But he was evidently neither the one nor the other. His works prove, beyond all contradiction, that his understanding was strong, his taste pure, and his sense of the ridiculous exquisitely keen. This is strange: and yet the strangest is behind. There is no reason whatever to think, that those amongst whom he lived saw anything shocking or incongruous in his writings. Abundant proofs remain of the high estimation in which both his works and his person were held by the most respectable among his contemporaries. Clement the Seventh patronised the publication of those very books which the Council of Trent, in the following generation, pronounced unfit for the perusal of During the gloomy and disastrous centuries which followed the downfal of the Roman Empire, Italy had preserved, in a far greater degree than any other part of Western Europe, the traces of ancient civilisation. The night which descended upon her was the night of an Arctic summer. The dawn began to reappear before the last reflection of the preceding sunset had faded from the horizon. It was in the time of the French Merovingians and of the Saxon Heptarchy that ignorance and ferocity seemed to have done their worst. Yet even then the Neapolitan provinces, recognising the authority of the Eastern Empire, preserved something of Eastern knowledge and refinement. Rome, protected by the sacred character of her Pontiffs, enjoyed at least comparative security and repose. Even in those regions where the sanguinary Lombards had fixed their monarchy, there was incomparably more of wealth, of information, of physical comfort, and of social order, than could be found in Gaul, Britain, or Germany. That which most distinguished Italy from the neighbouring countries was the importance which the population of the towns, at a very early period, | ment of the pullies, and the manufacture began to acquire. Some cities had of the thunders. They saw the natural been founded in wild and remote situa- faces and heard the natural voices of tions, by fugitives who had escaped from the rage of the barbarians. Such were Venice and Genoa, which preserved their freedom by their obscurity, till they became able to preserve it by their power. Other cities seem to have retained, under all the changing dynasties of invaders, under Odoacer and Theodoric, Narses and Alboin, the municipal institutions which had been conferred on them by the liberal policy of the Great Republic. In provinces which the central government was too feeble either to protect or to oppress, these institutions gradually acquired stability and vigour. The citizens, defended by their walls, and governed by their own magistrates and their own by-laws, enjoyed a considerable share of republican independence. Thus a strong democratic spirit was called into action. The Carlovingian sovereigns were too imbecile to subdue it. The generous policy of Otho encouraged it. It might perhaps have been suppressed by a close coalition between the Church and the Empire. It was fostered and invigorated by their disputes. In the twelfth century it attained its full vigour, and, after a long and doubtful conflict, triumphed over the abilities and courage of the Swabian Princes. the actors. Distant nations looked on the Pope as the vicegerent of the Almighty, the oracle of the All-wise, the umpire from whose decisions, in the disputes either of theologians or of kings, no Christian ought to appeal. The Italians were acquainted with all the follies of his youth, and with all the dishonest arts by which he had attained power. They knew how often he had employed the keys of the Church to release himself from the most sacred engagements, and its wealth to pamper his mistresses and nephews. The doctrines and rites of the established religion they treated with decent reverence. But though they still called themselves Catholics, they had ceased to be Papists. Those spiritual arms which carried terror into the palaces and camps of the proudest sovereigns excited only contempt in the immediate neighbourhood of the Vatican. Alexander, when he commanded our Henry the Second to submit to the lash before the tomb of a rebellious subject, was himself an exile. The Romans, apprehending that he entertained designs against their liberties, had driven him from their city; and, though he solemnly promised to confine himself for the future to his spiritual functions, they still refused to readmit him. The assistance of the Ecclesiastical power had greatly contributed to the In every other part of Europe, a success of the Guelfs. That success large and powerful privileged class would, however, have been a doubtful trampled on the people and defied the good, if its only effect had been to sub-government. But, in the most flourishstitute a moral for a political servitude, ing parts of Italy, the feudal nobles and to exalt the Popes at the expense were reduced to comparative insignifiof the Cæsars. Happily the public cance. In some districts they took mind of Italy had long contained the shelter under the protection of the seeds of free opinions, which were now powerful commonwealths which they rapidly developed by the genial influ-were unable to oppose, and gradually ence of free institutions. The people of sank into the mass of burghers. In that country had observed the whole other places they possessed great influmachinery of the church, its saints and ence; but it was an influence widely its miracles, its lofty pretensions and its different from that which was exercised splendid ceremonial, its worthless bless- by the aristocracy of any Transalings and its harmless curses, too long pine kingdom. They were not petty and too closely to be duped. They princes, but eminent citizens. Instead stood behind the scenes on which others of strengthening their fastnesses among were gazing with childish awe and in- the mountains, they embellished their terest. They witnessed the arrange-palaces in the market-place. The state |