n of
statecraft, and in nearly every one who reads and thinks you could find,
I suspect, some sort of answering response. But in every one it presents
itself extraordinarily entangled and mixed up with other, more intimate
things.

It was so with Machiavelli. I picture him at San Casciano as he lived
in retirement upon his property after the fall of the Republic, perhaps
with a twinge of the torture that punished his conspiracy still lurking
in his limbs. Such twinges could not stop his dreaming. Then it was "The
Prince" was written. All day he went about his personal affairs,
saw homely neighbours, dealt with his family, gave vent to everyday
passions. He would sit in the shop of Donato del Corno gossiping
curiously among vicious company, or pace the lonely woods of his estate,
book in hand, full of bitter meditations. In the evening he returned
home and went to his study. At the entrance, he says, he pulled off his
peasant clothes covered with the dust and dirt of that immediate life,
washed himself, put on his "noble court dress," closed the door on
the world of toiling and getting, private loving, private hating and
personal regrets, sat down with a sigh of contentment to those wider
dreams.

I like to think of him so, with brown books before him lit by the light
of candles in silver candlesticks, or heading some new chapter of "The
Prince," with a grey quill in his clean fine hand.

So writing, he becomes a symbol for me, and the less none because of his
animal humour, his queer indecent side, and because of such lapses
into utter meanness as that which made him sound the note of the
begging-letter writer even in his "Dedication," reminding His
Magnificence very urgently, as if it were the gist of his matter, of the
continued malignity of fortune in his affairs. These flaws complete him.
They are my reason for preferring him as a symbol to Plato, of whose
indelicate side we know nothing, and whose correspondence with Dionysius
of Syracuse has perished; or to Confucius who travelled China in search
of a Prince he might instruct, with lapses and indignities now lost
in the mists of ages. They have achieved the apotheosis of individual
forgetfulness, and Plato has the added glory of that acquired beauty,
that bust of the Indian Bacchus which is now indissolubly mingled with
his tradition. They have passed into the world of the ideal, and every
humbug takes his freedoms with their names. But Machiavelli, more recent