.

_Machiavel_.--If you had read my book with candour you would have
perceived that I did not desire to render men either tyrants or rebels,
but only showed, if they were so, what conduct, in such circumstances, it
would be rational and expedient for them to observe.

_Guise_.--When you were a minister of state in Florence, if any chemist
or physician had published a treatise, to instruct his countrymen in the
art of poisoning, and how to do it with the most certain destruction to
others and security to themselves, would you have allowed him to plead in
his justification that he did not desire men to poison their neighbours?
But, if they would use such evil means of mending their fortunes, there
could surely be no harm in letting them know what were the most effectual
poisons, and by what methods they might give them without being
discovered. Would you have thought it a sufficient apology for him that
he had dropped in his preface, or here and there in his book, a sober
exhortation against the committing of murder? Without all doubt, as a
magistrate concerned for the safety of the people of Florence, you would
have punished the wretch with the utmost severity, and taken great care
to destroy every copy of so pernicious a book. Yet your own admired work
contains a more baneful and more infernal art. It poisons states and
kingdoms, and spreads its malignity, like a general pestilence, over the
whole world.

_Machiavel_.--You must acknowledge at least that my discourses on Livy
are full of wise and virtuous maxims and precepts of government.

_Guise_.--This, I think, rather aggravates than alleviates your guilt.
How could you study and comment upon Livy with so acute and profound an
understanding, and afterwards write a book so absolutely repugnant to all
the lessons of policy taught by that sage and moral historian? How could
you, who had seen the picture of virtue so amiably drawn by his hand, and
who seemed yourself to be sensible of all its charms, fall in love with a
fury, and set up her dreadful image as an object of worship to princes?

_Machiavel_.--I was seduced by vanity. My heart was formed to love
virtue. But I wanted to be thought a greater genius in politics than
Aristotle or Plato. Vanity, sir, is a passion as strong in authors as
ambition in princes, or rather it is the same passion exerting itself
differently. I was a Duke of Guise in the republic of letters.

_Guise_.--The bad influences of