cause his death.[1] Disappointment he may indeed have felt: for his
moral force had been squandered during fifteen years in the attempt to
gain the favor of princes who were now once more regarded as the enemies
of their country. When the republic was at last restored, he found
himself in neither camp. The overtures which he had made to the Medici
had been but coldly received; yet they were sufficiently notorious to
bring upon him the suspicion of the patriots. He had not sincerely acted
up to the precept of Polonius: 'This above all,--to thine own self be
true.' His intellectual ability, untempered by sufficient political
consistency or moral elevation, had placed him among the outcasts:--

che non furon ribelli,
Nè fur fedeli a Dio, ma per sè foro.

The great achievement of these years was the composition of the _Istorie
Fiorentine_. The commission for this work he received from Giulio de'
Medici through the Officiali dello Studio in 1520, with an annual
allowance of 100 florins. In 1527, the year of his death, he dedicated
the finished History to Pope Clement VII. This masterpiece of literary
art, though it may be open to the charges of inaccuracy and
superficiality,[2] marks an epoch in the development of modern
historiography. It must be remembered that it preceded the great work of
Guicciardini by some years, and that before the date of its appearance
the annalists of Italy had been content with records of events, personal
impressions, and critiques of particular periods. Machiavelli was the
first to contemplate the life of a nation in its continuity, to trace
the operation of political forces through successive generations, to
contrast the action of individuals with the evolution of causes over
which they had but little control, and to bring the salient features of
the national biography into relief by the suppression of comparatively