often contradict their most brilliant and emphatic precepts; while
contemporaries disagree about their private character and public
conduct. All this confusion, through which it is now perhaps impossible
to discern what either Guicciardini or Machiavelli really was, and what
they really felt and thought, is due to the anomaly of consummate
ability and unrivaled knowledge of the world existing without religious
or political faith, in an age of the utmost depravity of public and
private morals. No criticism could be more stringent upon the
contemporary disorganization of society in Italy than is the silent
witness of these men, sublimely great in all mental qualities, but
helplessly adrift upon a sea of contradictions and of doubts, ignorant
of the real nature of mankind in spite of all their science, because
they leave both goodness and beauty out of their calculations.

Francesco Guicciardini was born in 1482. In 1505, at the age of
twenty-three, he had already so distinguished himself as a student of
law that he was appointed by the Signoria of Florence to read the
Institutes in public. However, as he preferred active to professorial
work, he began at this time to practice at the bar, where he soon ranked
as an able advocate and eloquent speaker. This reputation, together
with his character for gravity and insight, determined the Signoria to
send him on an embassy to the Court of Ferdinand of Aragon in 1512. Thus
Guicciardini entered on the real work of his life as a diplomatist and
statesman. We may also conclude with safety that it was at the court of
that crowned hypocrite and traitor to all loyalty of soul that he
learned his first lessons in political cynicism. The court of Spain
under Ferdinand the Catholic was a perfect school of perfidy, where even
an Italian might discern deeper reaches of human depravity and formulate
for his own guidance a philosophy of despair. It was whispered by his
enemies that here, upon the threshold of his public life, Guicciardini