whole are linked together, he says. With the reserve of "certain extraordinary strokes in which God intended that His hand alone should be manifest," no great change has ever taken place that had not its causes in ages that went before. These "extraordinary strokes," if they exist, and if he had pondered their significance, it must have puzzled Bossuet to reconcile with his theory of the chain-with what in modern language we should call the reign of law in history-which it was his express object to set forth. William of Tyre, the twelfth-century historian of the Crusades, hit this when he wrote: "To no one should the things done by our Lord be displeasing, for all His works are right and good. But according to the judgment of men, it was marvellous how our Lord permitted the Franks (the people in the world who honour Him most) to be thus destroyed by the enemies of the faith." Mr. Harrison's book, with no deliberate intention of his, for he is here a writer of neutral history, will give people of a reflective turn of mind, whether Jew, Mahometan, Christian, or Agnostic, if they be in the humour, many deep things to ruminate upon. APPENDIX NOTES TO MACHIAVELLI 1 The most complete account of the voluminous literature about Machiavelli up to 1858 is given in Robert Mohl's Geschichte und Literatur der Staatswissenschaften, iii. 521, etc. A later list is given by Tommasini, La Vita et gli scritti di N. M., i. 56-8. See also Villari; Lord Acton's learned Introduction to the Prince; and especially the bibliography attached to Mr. Burd's valuable chapter in vol. i. of the Cambridge Modern History, pp. 719-26. Of the French contributions, Nourrisson's Machiavel (edition of 1883) seems much the most vigorous, in spite of occasional outbreaks of the curious feeling between Frenchmen and Italians. Among political pamphlets may be named Dialogue aux enfers, entre Machiavel et Montesquieu; ou la politique de Machiavel au 19e siècle: par un Contemporain (1864)— an energetic exposure of the Second Empire.-Machiavel, et l'influence de sa doctrine, sur les opinions, les mœurs, et la politique de la France pendant la Révolution: par M. de Mazères; Paris, 1816-a royalist indictment of Machiavelli, as the inspirer alike of Jacobins and Bonaparte. M. Tassin's Gianotti, sa vie, son temps, et ses doctrines (1869), published on the eve of the overthrow of the Second Empire, and seeming to use the Italian publicist mainly as a mask for condemning the French government of the day. Gianotti (1492-1572) was of Savonarola's school, and M. Tassin uses him as a foil for Machiavelli. Others of less quality are: Dante, Michel-Ange, Machiavel. Par C. Calemard de Lafayette. Paris, 1852.-Essai sur les œuvres et la doctrine de Machiavel. Par Paul Deltuf. Paris, 1867.— Machiavel, Montesquieu, Rousseau. Von Jacob Venedey. Berlin, 1850.-Written after the events of 1848 in Germany, the author's object being to show that the three writers named were the representatives of the only three possible systems of government, and of these three Machiavelli stands for all that is wicked and reactionary, Rousseau for progress and humanity. The book is composed, not from any scientific point of view, but to illustrate contemporary politics. Louis Philippe is said (p. 66) to be the greatest scholar that Machiavelli ever had, and there are a good many remarks on the death of Machiavellismus "in France and Germany, which have hardly been borne out by history since 1850. 66 66 2 Machiavelli and the Elizabethan Drama. Von Edward Meyer (Weimar, 1897), p. xi. Mr. Courthope, History of English Poetry (ii. ch. 12), has shown how much Marlowe had studied Machiavelli, and states his view of the effect of this study as follows: What we find in Marlowe is Seneca's exaltation of the freedom of the human will, dissociated from the idea of Necessity, and joined with Machiavelli's principle of the excellence of virtù. This principle is represented under a great variety of aspects; sometimes in the energy of a single heroic character, as in Tamburlaine; sometimes in the pursuit of unlawful knowledge, as in Faustus: again, in The Jew of Malta, in the boundless hatred and revenge of Barabas; in Guise plotting the massacre of the Huguenots out of cold-blooded policy; and in Mortimer planning the murder of Edward II. from purely personal ambition. Incidentally, no doubt, in some of these instances, the indulgence of unrestrained passion brings ruin in its train; but it is not so much for the sake of the moral that Marlowe composed his tragedies, as because his imagination delighted in the exhibition of the vast and tremendous consequences produced by the determined exercise of will in pursuit of selfish objects."-P. 405. The reader will remember that Machiavelli speaks the prologue to The Jew of Malta, with these two lines: I count religion but a childish toy, It is not denied by Herr Meyer or others, that Marlowe had studied Machiavelli in the original, and Mr. Courthope seems to make good his contention that it was Marlowe's conception of M.'s principle of virtù that revolutionised the English drama. 3 "Old Nick is the vulgar name for the Evil Being in the north of England, and is a name of great antiquity. We borrowed it from the title of an evil genius among the ancient Danes," etc. etc. On the line in Hudibras, "We may observe that he was called Old Nick many ages before the famous, or rather infamous, Nicholas Machiavel was born."-Brand's Popular Antiquities, ii. 364. (Ed. 1816.) • See Tommasini, i. 27-30. Our excellent Ascham declares that he honoured the old Romans as the best breeders and bringers up for well-doing in all civil affairs that ever were in the world, but the new Rome was the home of devilish opinions and unbridled sin, and one of the worst patriarchs of its impiety was Machiavelli. Schoolmaster (1563-8), Mayor's Edition, 1863, p. 86. Fuller, quoted in Mayor's note, expresses a better opinion of Machiavelli, and says that "that which hath sharpened the pens of many against him is his giving so many cleanly wipes to the foul noses of the pope and the Italian prelacy " (1642). "At the beginning of the seventeenth century the Venetian senate was asked to permit the publication of Boccalini's Commentaries on Tacitus. The request was referred to five of the senators for examination. It is the teaching of Tacitus,' they said, 'that has produced Machiavelli, and the other bad authors who would destroy public virtue. We should replace Tacitus by Livy and Polybius-historians of the happier and more virtuous times of the Roman republic, and by Thucydides, the historian of the Greek republic, who found themselves in circumstances like those of Venice." "-Sclopis, Revue hist. de droit français et étranger (1856), ii. 25. For the literary use made of Tacitus against the Spanish domination in Italy, see Ferrari, Hist. de la raison d'Etat, p. 315. 66 5 An interesting article appeared in the Nineteenth Century (December 1896), designed to show the effect of Machiavelli on the English statesmen of the Reformation. The writer admits that there is no evidence to prove that the action of Elizabeth was consciously based on a study of the Prince, but he finds, as he thinks, proof positive that Burleigh had studied Machiavelli in a paper of advice from the Lord Treasurer to the Queen. The proof consists in such sentences as these: Men's natures are apt to strive not only against the present smart, but in revenging bypast injury, though they be never so well contented thereafter -"no man loves one the better for giving him the bastinado, though with never so little a cudgel ";" the course of the most wise estates hath ever been to make an assurance of friendship, or to take away all power of enmity"; and so forth. Burleigh very likely may have read the Prince, but it is going too far to assume that a sage statesman must have learned the commonplaces of political prudence out of a book. 66 "Cecil asked English ambassadors abroad to procure him copies, and even that harmless gossip, Sir Richard Morison, wiled away his leisure hours at the Emperor's Court in perusing it, making frequent reference to it in his correspondence (see State Papers, Foreign Series, Edward VI. passim; Sloane MSS. 1523; and Harleian MSS. 353, ff. 130-9)."-Pollard's England under Protector Somerset, p. 284. • Dr. Abbott, attacking Bacon with the same bitterness with which Machiavelli was attacked for three centuries (Francis Bacon, 1885, pp. 325 and 457-60), insists that the Florentine secretary was the chancellor's master; but such criticism seems to show as one-sided a misapprehension of one as of the other. Dr. Fowler, once President of Corpus Christi College, has dealt conclusively, as I judge, with Dr. Abbott's case, in the preface to his second edition of the Novum Organum (1889), pp. xii-xx, and in his excellent short monograph on Bacon (1881), pp. 41-5. 7 Mackintosh reproached Bacon for this way of treating history. Spedding stoutly defends it, rather oddly appealing to the narrative of the New Testament, as an example of the most wicked of all judgments, recounted four times" without a single indignant comment or a single vituperative expression." -Works, Spedding and Heath, vol. vi. pp. 8-16. On this last point Pascal says: "The style of the gospel is admirable among other ways in this, that there is not a word of invective against the murderers or foes of Jesus Christ. For there is none against Judas, Pilate, or any of the Jews; and so forth."-Pensées, Art. xix. 2. ed. Havet, ii. 39. See also Havet's note, p. 44. Bacon says M. made a wise and apt choice of method for government-" namely, discourse upon histories or examples; for knowledge drawn freshly, and in our view, out of particulars, findeth its way best to particulars again; and it hath much greater life in practice when the discourse attendeth upon the example than when the example attendeth upon the discourse. 8 Harrington's view is expressed in such a sentence as this: "Corruption in government is to be read and considered in Machiavel, as diseases in a man's body are to be read and considered in Hippocrates. Neither Hippocrates nor Machiavel introduced diseases into man's body, nor corruption into government which were before their time; and seeing they do but discover them, it must be confessed that so much as they have done tends not to the increase but to the cure of them, which is the truth of these two authors."-System of Politics, ch. x. Elsewhere he compares the Italian to one who exposes the tricks of a juggler. • Essays, i. 156; ii. 391, where he remarks that historians have been almost always friends of virtue, but that the politician is much less scrupulous as to acts of power. 10 This sentence is Treverret's, L'Italie au 16ième siècle, i. 179. Sainte-Beuve has a short comparison between the two in Causeries, vii. 67-70. Machiavelli attached himself to particular facts, and proposed expedients. Montesquieu tried to 66 |