his age. He had witnessed his terrible yet beneficial administration of
Romagna. He had been present at his murder of the chiefs of the Orsini
faction at Sinigaglia. Cesare had confided to him, or had pretended to
confide, his schemes of personal ambition, as well as the motives and
the measures of his secret policy. On the day of the election of Pope
Julius II. he had laid bare the whole of his past history before the
Florentine secretary, and had pointed out the single weakness of which
he felt himself to have been guilty. In these trials of skill and this
exchange of confidence it is impossible to say which of the two
gamesters may have been the more deceived. But Machiavelli felt that the
Borgia supplied him with a perfect specimen for the study of the arts of
statecraft; and so deep was the impression produced upon his mind, that
even after the utter failure of Cesare's designs he made him the hero of
the political romance before us. His artistic perception of the perfect
and the beautiful, both in unscrupulous conduct and in frigid
calculation of conflicting interests, was satisfied by the steady
selfishness, the persistent perfidy, the profound mistrust of men, the
self-command in the execution of perilous designs, the moderate and
deliberate employment of cruelty for definite ends, which he observed in
the young Duke, and which he has idealized in his own _Principe_. That
nature, as of a salamander adapted to its element of fire, as of 'a
resolute angel that delights in flame,' to which nothing was sacred,
which nothing could daunt, which never for a moment sacrificed reason to
passion, which was incapable of weakness or fatigue, had fascinated
Machiavelli's fancy. The moral qualities of the man, the base
foundations upon which he raised his power, the unutterable scandals of
his private life, and the hatred of all Christendom were as nothing in
the balance. Such considerations had, according to the conditions of his
subject, to be eliminated before he weighed the intellectual qualities
of the adventurer. 'If all the achievements of the Duke are