of clear flaming patriotism, of undying hope that will not in the
darkest day despair, the plangent appeal to Italy for its own great sake
to rouse and live, all these are found pre-eminently in the History as
they are found wherever Machiavelli speaks from the heart of his heart.
Of the style a foreigner may not speak. But those who are proper judges
maintain that in simplicity and lucidity, vigour, and power, softness,
elevation, and eloquence, the style of Machiavelli is 'divine,' and
remains, as that of Dante among the poets, unchallenged and insuperable
among all writers of Italian prose.

[Sidenote: Other Works.]

Though Machiavelli must always stand as a political thinker, an
historian, and a military theorist it would leave an insufficient idea
of his mental activities were there no short notice of his other
literary works. With his passion for incarnating his theories in a
single personality, he wrote the _Life of Castruccio Castracani_, a
politico-military romance. His hero was a soldier of fortune born Lucca
in 1281, and, playing with a free hand, Machiavelli weaves a life of
adventure and romance in which his constant ideas of war and politics
run through and across an almost imaginary tapestry. He seems to have
intended to illustrate and to popularise his ideals and to attain by a
story the many whom his discourses could not reach. In verse Machiavelli
was fluent, pungent, and prosaic. The unfinished _Golden Ass_ is merely
made of paragraphs of the _Discorsi_ twined into rhymes. And the others
are little better. Countless pamphlets, essays, and descriptions may be
searched without total waste by the very curious and the very leisurely.
The many despatches and multitudinous private letters tell the story
both of his life and his mind. But the short but famous _Novella di
Belfagor Arcidiavolo_ is excellent in wit, satire, and invention. As a