h, I wish to say--can throw down the
glove before his English of that antique time and not be afraid.

I will got back to the paper on Machiavelli now, and ask the reader to
examine this passage from it which I append. I do not mean examine it
in a bird's-eye way; I mean search it, study it. And, of course, read it
aloud. I may be wrong, still it is my conviction that one cannot get out
of finely wrought literature all that is in it by reading it mutely:

Mr. Dyer is rather of the opinion, first luminously suggested by
Macaulay, that Machiavelli was in earnest, but must not be judged as a
political moralist of our time and race would be judged. He thinks that
Machiavelli was in earnest, as none but an idealist can be, and he
is the first to imagine him an idealist immersed in realities, who
involuntarily transmutes the events under his eye into something like
the visionary issues of reverie. The Machiavelli whom he depicts does
not cease to be politically a republican and socially a just man because
he holds up an atrocious despot like Caesar Borgia as a mirror for
rulers. What Machiavelli beheld round him in Italy was a civic disorder
in which there was oppression without statecraft, and revolt without
patriotism. When a miscreant like Borgia appeared upon the scene and
reduced both tyrants and rebels to an apparent quiescence, he might very
well seem to such a dreamer the savior of society whom a certain sort of
dreamers are always looking for. Machiavelli was no less honest when he
honored the diabolical force than Carlyle was when at different times
he extolled the strong man who destroys liberty in creating order. But
Carlyle has only just ceased to be mistaken for a reformer, while it is
still Machiavelli's hard fate to be so trammeled in his material that
his name stands for whatever is most malevolent and perfidious in human
nature.

You see how easy and flowing it is; how unvexed by ruggednesses,
clumsinesses, broken meters; how simple and--so far as you or I can
make out--unstudied; how clear, how limpid, how understandable,
how unconfused by cross-currents, eddies, undertows; how seemingly
unadorned, yet is all adornment, like the lily-of-the-valley; and how
compressed, how compact, without a complacency-signal hung out anywhere
to call attention to it.

There are twenty-three lines in the quoted passage. After reading it
several times aloud, one perceives that a good deal of matter is crowded
into that s