We had intended to look more closely at These are perhaps foolish feelings. Yet we their performances, to analyze the peculiari- cannot be ashamed of them; nor shall we be ties of their diction, to dwell at some length sorry if what we have written shall in any de on the sublime wisdom of the Areopagitica, gree excite them in other minds. We are not and the nervous rhetoric of the Iconoclast, and much in the habit of idolizing either the living to point out some of those magnificent pas-or the dead. And we think that there is no sages which occur in the Treatise of Reforma- more certain indication of a weak and ill-regu tion and the Animadversions on the Remon-lated intellect than that propensity which, for strant. But the length to which our remarks want of a better name, we will venture to have already extended renders this impossible. christen Boswellism. But there are a few chaWe must conclude. And yet we can scarce-racters which have stood the closest scrutiny ly tear ourselves away from the subject. The and the severest tests, which have been tried days immediately following the publication of in the furnace and have proved pure, which this relic of Milton appear to be peculiarly set have been weighed in the balance and have apart and consecrated to his memory. And not been found wanting, which have been dewe shall scarcely be censured if, on this his clared sterling by the general consent of manfestival, we be found lingering near his shrine, | kind, and which are visibly stamped with the how worthless soever may be the offering image and superscription of the Most High. which we bring to it. While this book lies These great men we trust that we know how on our table, we seem to be contemporaries to prize; and of these was Milton. The sight of the great poet. We are transported a hun- of his books, the sound of his name, are redred and fifty years back. We can almost freshing to us. His thoughts resemble those fancy that we are visiting him in his small celestial fruits and flowers which the Virgin lodging; that we see him sitting at the old or- Martyr of Massinger sent down from the gargan beneath the faded green hangings; that dens of Paradise to the earth, distinguished we can catch the quick twinkle of his eyes, from the productions of other soils, not only rolling in vain to find the day; that we are by their superior bloom and sweetness, but by reading in the lines of his noble countenance their miraculous efficacy to invigorate and to the proud and mournful history of his glory heal. They are powerful, not only to delight, and his affliction! We image to ourselves the but to elevate and purify. Nor do we envy breathless silence in which we should listen the man who can study either the life or the to his slightest word; the passionate venera- writings of the great Poet and Patriot without tion with which we should kneel to kiss his aspiring to emulate, not indeed the sublime hand and weep upon it; the earnestness with works with which his genius has enriched our which we should endeavour to console him, if literature, but the zeal with which he laboured indeed such a spirit could need consolation, for for the public good, the fortitude with which the neglect of an age unworthy of his talents he endured every private calamity, the lofty and his virtues; the eagerness with which we disdain with which he looked down on temptashould contest with his daughters, or with his tion and dangers, the deadly hatred which he Quaker friend, Elwood, the privilege of read-bore to bigots and tyrants, and the faith which ing Homer to him, or of taking down the im- he so sternly kept with his country and with mortal accents which flowed from his lips. his fame.

MACHIAVELLI.*

THOSE who have attended to the practice of monly described would seem to import that he our literary tribunal are well aware that, by was the Tempter, the Evil Principle, the dismeans of certain legal fictions similar to those coverer of ambition and revenge, the original of Westminster Hall, we are frequently en-inventor of perjury; that, before the publicaabled to take cognisance of cases lying beyond | tion of his fatal Prince, there had never been a the sphere of our original jurisdiction. We hypocrite, a tyrant, or a traitor, a simulated One writer need hardly say, therefore, that, in the present virtue or a convenient crime. instance, M. Périer is merely a Richard Roe-gravely assures us, that Maurice of Saxony that his name is used for the sole purpose of learned all his fraudulent policy from that ex bringing Machiavelli into court-and that he ecrable volume. Another remarks, that since will not be mentioned in any subsequent stage it was translated into Turkish, the Sultans of the proceedings. have been more addicted than formerly to the custom of strangling their brothers. Our own foolish Lord Lyttleton charges the poor Floren tine with the manifold treasons of the House of Guise, and the massacre of St. Bartholomew Several authors have hinted that the Gunpow der Plot is to be primarily attributed to his doctrines, and seem to think that his effigy

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 com

* Œuvres complétes de Machiavel, traduites par J. V. PERIER. Paris, 1825.

ought to be substituted for that of Guy Fawkes, in those processions by which the ingenuous youth of England annually commemorate the preservation of the Three Estates. The Church of Rome has 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.*

It is indeed scarcely possible for any person, not well acquainted with the history and literature of Italy, to read, without horror and amazement, the celebrated treatise which has brought so much obloquy on the name of Machiavelli. Such a display of wickedness, naked, yet not ashamed, such cool, judicious, scientific atrocity, seem rather to belong to a fiend than to the most depraved of men. Principles which the most hardened ruffian would scarcely hint to his most trusted accomplice, or avow, without the disguise of some palliating sophism, even to his own mind, are professed without the slightest circumlocution, and assumed as the fundamental axioms of all political science.

covered-in his Comedies, designed for the entertainment of the multitude-in his Com. ments on Livy, intended for the perusal of the most enthusiastic patriots of Florence-in his History, inscribed to one of the most amiable and estimable of the Popes-in his Public Despatches-in his private Memoranda, the same obliquity of moral principle for which the Prince 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 it may seem ridiculous to say, that we are acquainted with few writings which exhibit so much elevation of sentiment, so pure and warm a zeal for the public good, or so just a view of the duties and rights of citi zens, 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 qualitiesIt is not strange that ordinary readers should selfishness and generosity, cruelty and benevoregard the author of such a book as the most lence, craft and simplicity, abject villany and depraved and shameless of human beings. | romantic heroism. One sentence is such as a Wise men, however, have always been in- veteran diplomatist would scarcely write in clined to look with great suspicion on the an- cipher for the direction of his most confidengels and demons of the multitude; and in the tial spy: the next seems to be extracted from present instance, several circumstances have a theme composed by an ardent schoolboy on led even superficial observers to question the the death of Leonidas. An act of dexterous justice of the vulgar decision. It is notorious perfidy, and an act of patriotic self-devotion, that Machiavelli was, through life, a zealous call forth the same kind and the same degree republican. In the same year in which he of respectful admiration. The moral sensi composed his manual of Kingcraft, he suffered bility of the writer seems at once to be imprisonment and torture in the cause of morbidly obtuse and morbidly acute. Two public liberty. It seems inconceivable that characters altogether dissimilar are united in the martyr of freedom should have design- him. They are not merely joined, but inter edly acted as the apostle of tyranny. Several woven. They are the warp and the woof of eminent writers have, therefore, endeavoured his mind; and their combination, like that of to detect, in this unfortunate performance, the variegated threads in shot silk, gives to the some concealed meaning more consistent with whole texture a glancing and ever-changing the character and conduct of the author than appearance. The explanation might have that which appears at the first glance. 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 understand ing was strong, his taste pure, and his sense of the ridiculous exquisitely keen.

One hypothesis is, that Machiavelli intended to practice on the young Lorenzo de Medici a fraud, similar to that which Sunderland is said to have employed against our James the Second, that he urged his pupil to violent and perfidious measures, as the surest means of accelerating the moment of deliverance and revenge. Another supposition, which Lord Bacon seems to countenance, is, that the treatise was merely a piece of grave irony, intended to warn nations against the arts of ambitious men. It would be easy to show that neither of these solutions is consistent with many passages in the Prince itself. But the most decisive refutation is that which is furnished by the other works of Machiavelli. In all the writings which he gave to the public, and in all those which the research of editors has, in the course of three centuries, dis

This is strange-and yet the strangest is behind. There is no reason whatever to think, that those amongst whom he lived saw any thing 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 Christians. Some members of the democratical party censured the secretary 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 AntiMachiavelli 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.

During the gloomy and disastrous centuries which followed the downfall of the Roman Empire, Italy had preserved, in a far greater degree than any other part of Western Europe, the traces of ancient civilization. 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 refine ment. Rome, protected by the sacred character of its 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.

been to substitute a moral for a political servi tude, to exalt the Popes at the expense of the Cæsars. Happily the public mind of Italy had long contained the seeds of free opinions which were now rapidly developed by the ga nial influence of free institutions. The people of that country had observed the whole ma chinery of the church, its saints and its miracles, its lofty pretensions and its splendid ceremonial, its worthless blessings and its harmless curses, too long and too closely to be duped. They stood behind the scenes on which others were gazing with childish awe and interest. They witnessed the arrangement of the pul leys, and the manufacture of the thunders. They saw the natural faces and heard the natural voices of the actors. Distant nations looked on the Pope as the vicegerent of the Almighty, the oracle of the All-wise, the um pire from whose decisions, in the disputes either of theologians or of kings, no Christian ought to appeal. The Italians were acquaint ed 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 em ployed the keys of the church to release him self 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 their contempt. When Alexander commanded our Henry the Second to submit to the lash before the tomb of a rebellious subject, he 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 re-admit him.

That which most distinguished Italy from the neighbouring countries was the importance which the population of the towns, from a very early period, began to acquire. Some cities founded in wild and remote situations, by fugitives who had escaped from the rage of the barbarians, preserved their freedom by their obscurity, till they became able to preserve it In every other part of Europe, a large and by their power. Others seemed to have re- powerful privileged class trampled on the peotained, under all the changing dynasties of ple and defied the government. But in the invaders, under Odoacer and Theodoric, Narses most flourishing parts of Italy the feudal noand Alboin, the municipal institutions which bles were reduced to comparative insignifihad 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 first acquired stability and vigour. The citizens, defended by their walls and governed by their own magistrates and their own bylaws, 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, it triumphed over the abilities and courage of the Swabian Princes.

The assistance of the ecclesiastical power had greatly contributed to the success of the Guelis. That success would, however, have been a doubtful good, if its only effect had

cance. In some districts they took shelter under the protection of the powerful commonwealths which they were unable to oppose, and gradually sunk into the mass of burghers. In others they possessed great influence; but it was an influence widely different from that which was exercised by the chieftains of the Transalpine kingdoms. They were not petty princes, but eminent citizens. Instead of strengthening their fastnesses among the mountains, they embellished their places in the market-place. The state of society in the Neapolitan "dominions, and in some parts of the Ecclesiastical State, more nearly resembled that which existed in the great monarchies of Europe. But the governments of Lombardy and Tuscany, through all their revolutions, preserved a different character. A people, when assembled in a town, is far more formidable to its rulers than when dispersed over a wide extent of country. The most arbitrary of the Caesars found it necessary to feed and divert the inhabitants of their unwieldy capi

tal at the expense of the provinces. The citizens of Madrid have more than once besieged heir sovereign in his own palace, and extorted from him the most humiliating concessions. The sultans have often been compelled to propitiate the furious rabble of Constantinople with the head of an unpopular vizier. From the same cause there was a certain tinge of democracy in the monarchies and aristocracies of Northern Italy.

a hundred and seventy thousand inhabitants. In the various schools about ten thousand children were taught to read; twelve hundred studied arithmetic; six hundred received a learned education. The progress of elegant literature and of the fine arts was proportioned to that of the public prosperity. Under the despotic successors of Augustus, all the fields of the intellect had been turned into arid wastes, still marked out by formal boundaries, Thus liberty, partially, indeed, and transient- still retaining the traces of old cultivation, but ly, revisited Italy; and with liberty came com-yielding neither flowers nor fruit. The deluge merce and empire, science and taste, all the of barbarism came. It swept away all the comforts and all the ornaments of life. The landmarks. It obliterated all the signs of forcrusades, from which the inhabitants of other mer tillage. But it fertilized while it devas countries gained nothing but relics and tated. When it receded, the wilderness was wounds, brought the rising commonwealths as the garden of God, rejoicing on every side, of the Adriatic and Tyrrhene seas a large in- | laughing, clapping its hands, pouring forth in crease of wealth, dominion, and knowledge. spontaneous abundance every thing brilliant, Their moral and their geographical position or fragrant, or nourishing. A new language, enabled them to profit alike by the barbarism characterized by simple sweetness and simple of the West and the civilization of the East. energy, had attained its perfection. No tongue Their ships covered every sea. Their fac- ever furnished more gorgeous and vivid tints tories rose on every shore. Their money- to poetry; nor was it long before a poet apchangers set their tables in every city. Manu-peared who knew how to employ them. Early factures flourished. Banks were established. in the fourteenth century came forth the DiThe operations of the commercial machine vine Comedy, beyond comparison the greatest were facilitated by many useful and beautiful work of imagination which had appeared since inventions. We doubt whether any country | the poems of Homer. The following generaof Europe, our own perhaps excepted, have at tion produced, indeed, no second Dante; but the present time reached so high a point of it was eminently distinguished by general inwealth and civilization as some parts of Italy | tellectual activity. The study of the Latin had attained four hundred years ago. Histo-writers had never been wholly neglected in rians rarely descend to those details from Italy. But Petrarch introduced a more prowhich alone the real state of a community found, liberal, and elegant scholarship; and can be collected. Hence posterity is too often communicated to his countrymen that enthudeceived by the vague hyperboles of poets and siasm for the literature, the history, and the rhetoricians, who mistake the splendour of a antiquities of Rome, which divided his own court for the happiness of a people. Fortu-heart with a frigid mistress and a more frigid nately John Villani has given us an ample and precise account of the state of Florence in the earlier part of the fourteenth century. The From this time the admiration of learning revenue of the republic amounted to three and genius became almost an idolatry among hundred thousand florins, a sum which, allow- the people of Italy. Kings and republics, caring for the depreciation of the precious metals, dinals and doges, vied with each other in howas at least equivalent to six hundred thou-nouring and flattering Petrarch. Embassies sand pounds sterling; a larger sum than Eng- from rival states solicited the honour of his inland and Ireland, two centuries ago, yielded an-structions. His coronation agitated the court nually to Elizabeth—a larger sum than, according to any computation which we have seen, the Grand-duke of Tuscany now derives from a territory of much greater extent. The manufacture of wool alone employed two hundred factories and thirty thousand workmen. The cloth annually produced sold, at an average, for twelve hundred thousand florins; a sum fairly equal, in exchangeable value, to two millions and a half of our money. Four hundred thousand florins were annually coined. Eighty banks conducted the commercial operations, not of Florence only, but of all Europe. The transactions of these establishments were sometimes of a magnitude which may surprise even the contemporaries of the Barings and the Rothschilds. Two houses advanced to Edward the Third of England upwards of three hundred thousand marks, at a time when the mark contained more silver than fifty shillings of the present day, and when the value of silver was more than quadruple of what it now is. The city and its environs contained

muse. Boccaccio turned their attention to the more sublime and graceful models of Greece.

of Naples and the people of Rome as much as the most important political transactions could have done. To collect books and antiques, to found professorships, to patronise men of learning, became almost universal fashions among the great. The spirit of literary research allied itself to that of commercial enterprise. Every place to which the merchantprinces of Florence extended their gigantic traffic, from the bazaars of the Tigris to the monasteries of the Clyde, was ransacked for medals and manuscripts. Architecture, painting, and sculpture were munificently encouraged. Indeed it would be difficult to name an Italian of eminence during the period of which we speak, who, whatever may have been his general character, did not at least affect a .ove of letters and of the arts.

Knowledge and public prosperity continued to advance together. Both attained their meridian in the age of Lorenzo the Magnificent. We cannot refrain from quoting the splendid passage, in which the Tuscan Thucydides de

of society which facilitated the gigantic con quests of Attila and Timour.

But a people which subsists by the cultiva tion of the earth is in a very different situation. The husbandman is bound to the soil on which he labours. A long campaign would be ruinous to him. Still his pursuits are such as give to his frame both the active and the passive strength necessary to a soldier. Nor do they, at least in the infancy of agricultural science, demand his uninterrupted attention. At par ticular times of the year he is almost wholly unemployed, and can, without injury to him self, afford the time necessary for a short expedition. Thus, the legions of Rome were supplied during its earlier wars. The season, during which the farms did not require the presence of the cultivators, sufficed for a short inroad and a battle. These operations, too frequently interrupted to produce decisive results, yet served to keep up among the people a degree of discipline and courage which rendered them, not only secure, but formidable. The archers and billmen of the middle ages, who, with provisions for forty days at their backs, left the fields for the camp, were troops of the same description.

scribes the state of Italy at that period:-Ridotta tutta in somma pace e tranquillità, coltivata non meno ne' luoghi più montuosi e più sterili che nelle pianure e regioni più fertili, nè sottoposta ad altro imperio che de 'suoi medesimi, non solo era abbondantissima d'abitatori e di ricchezze; ma illustrata sommamente dalla magnificenza di molti principi, dallo splendore di molte nobilissime e bellissime città, dalla sedia e maestà delle religione, fioriva d'uomini prestantissimi nell' amministrazione delle cose pubbliche, e d'ingegni molto nobili in tutte le scienze, ed in qualunque arte preclara ed industriosa."* When we peruse this just and splendid description, we can scarcely persuade ourselves that we are reading of times, in which the annals of England and France present us only with a frightful spectacle of poverty, barbarity, and ignorance. From the oppressions of illiterate masters, and the sufferings of a brutalized peasantry, it is delightful to turn to the opulent and enlightened States of Italy-to the vast and magnificent cities, the ports, the arsenals, the villas, the museums, the libraries, the marts filled with every article of comfort and luxury, the manufactories swarming with artisans, the Apennines covered with rich cultivation up to their But, when commerce and manufactures very summits, the Po wafting the harvests of begin to flourish, a great change takes place. Lombardy to the granaries of Venice, and car- The sedentary habits of the desk and the loom rying back the silks of Bengal and the firs of render the exertions and hardships of war inSiberia to the palaces of Milan. With pecu-supportable. The occupations of traders and iar pleasure, every cultivated mind must repose on the fair, the happy, the glorious Florence-on the halls which rung with the mirth of Pulci―the cell where twinkled the midnight lamp of Politian-the statues on which the young eye of Michel Angelo glared with the frenzy of a kindred inspiration-the gardens in which Lorenzo meditated some sparkling song for the May-day dance of the Etrurian virgins. Alas, for the beautiful city! Alas, for the wit and the learning, the genius and

the love!

"Le donne, e cavalier, gli affanni, gli agi,
Che ne'nvogliav' amore e cortesia,
La dove i cuor' son fatti ei malvagi."+

A time was at hand, when all the seven vials of the Apocalypse were to be poured forth and shaken out over those pleasant countries-a time for slaughter, famine, beggary, infamy, slavery, despair.

In the Italian States, as in many natural bodies, untimely decrepitude was the penalty of precocious maturity. Their early greatness, and their early decline, are principally to be attributed to the same cause the preponderance which the towns acquired in the political sys

artisans require their constant presence and attention. In such a community, there is little superfluous time; but there is generally much superfluous money. Some members of the society are, therefore, hired to relieve the rest from a task inconsistent with their habits and engagements.

The history of Greece is, in this, as in many other respects, the best commentary on the history of Italy. Five hundred years before the Christian era, the citizens of the republics round the Ægean Sea formed perhaps the finest militia that ever existed. As wealth and refinement advanced, the system underwent a gradual alteration. The Ionian States were the first in which commerce and 'he arts were cultivated, and the first in which the ancient discipline decayed. Within eighty years after the battle of Platea, mercenary troops were everywhere plying for battles and sieges. In the time of Demosthenes, it was scarcely possible to persuade or compel the Athenians to enlist for foreign service. The laws of Lycur gus prohibited trade and manufactures. The Spartans, therefore, continued to form a national force, long after their neighbours had begun to hire soldiers. But their military spirit declined with their singular institutions. In the second century, Greece contained only one nation of warriors, the savage highlanders of Ætolia, who were at least ten generations behind their countrymen in civilization and intelligence.

All the causes which produced these effects among the Greeks acted still more strongly on the modern Italians. Instead of a power like Sparta, in its nature warlike, they had amongst them an ecclesiastical state, in its nature pacific. Where there are numerous slaves, every freeman is induced by the strongest motives ta