forth the same kind and the same degree of respectful admiration.
The moral sensibility of the writer seems at once to be morbidly
obtuse and morbidly acute. Two characters altogether dissimilar
are united in him. They are not merely joined, but interwoven.
They are the warp and the woof of his mind; and their
combination, like that of the variegated threads in shot silk,
gives to the whole texture a glancing and ever-changing
appearance. The explanation might have been easy, if he had been
a very weak or a very affected man. But he was evidently neither
the one nor the other. His works prove, beyond all contradiction,
that his understanding was strong, his taste pure, and his sense
of the ridiculous exquisitely keen.

This is strange: and yet the strangest is behind. There is no
reason whatever to think, that those amongst whom he lived saw
anything shocking or incongruous in his writings. Abundant proofs
remain of the high estimation in which both his works and his
person were held by the most respectable among his
contemporaries. Clement the Seventh patronised the publication of
those very books which the Council of Trent, in the following
generation, pronounced unfit for the perusal of Christians. Some
members of the democratical party censured the Secretary for
dedicating The Prince to a patron who bore the unpopular name of
Medici. But to those immoral doctrines which have since called
forth such severe reprehensions no exception appears to have been
taken. The cry against them was first raised beyond the Alps, and
seems to have been heard with amazement in Italy. The earliest
assailant, as far as we are aware, was a countryman of our own,
Cardinal Pole. The author of the Anti-Machiavelli was a French
Protestant.