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, discovered, in his Comedies, designed for the
entertainment of the multitude, in his Comments 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 citizens, 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 qualities, selfishness and generosity, cruelty and
benevolence, craft and simplicity, abject villainy and romantic
heroism. One sentence is such as a veteran diplomatist would
scarcely write in cipher for the direction of his most
confidential spy; the next seems to be extracted from a theme
composed by an ardent schoolboy on the death of Leonidas. An act
of dexterous perfidy, and an act of patriotic self-devotion, call