y but a
high-flying adventurer--or a brigand-chief, if the melodramatic term is
more captivating to your fancy?

These terms are used to belittle Cesare. They achieve no more, however,
than to belittle those who penned them; for, even as they are true,
the marvel is that the admirable matter in these truths appears to have
escaped those authors.

What else Gregorovius opines--that Cesare was no Messiah of United
Italy--is true enough. Cesare was the Messiah of Cesare. The well-being
of Italy for its own sake exercised his mind not so much as
the well-being of the horse he rode. He wrought for his own
aggrandisement--but he wrought wisely; and, whilst the end in view is no
more to be censured than the ambition of any man, the means employed
are in the highest degree to be commended, since the well-being of
the Romagna, which was not an aim, was, nevertheless, an essential and
praiseworthy incident.

When it can be shown that every other of those conquerors who cut heroic
figures in history were purest altruists, it will be time to damn Cesare
Borgia for his egotism.

What Villari says, for the purpose of adding rhetorical force to
his "brigand-chief"--that Cesare was no statesman and no soldier--is
entirely of a piece with the rest of the chapter in which it
occurs(1)--a chapter rich in sweeping inaccuracies concerning Cesare.
But it is staggering to find the statement in such a place, amid
Macchiavelli's letters on Cesare, breathing an obvious and profound
admiration of the duke's talents as a politician and a soldier--an
admiration which later is to go perilously near to worship. To
Macchiavelli, Cesare is the incarnation of a hazy ideal, as is
abundantly shown in The Prince. For Villari to reconcile all this with
his own views must seem impossible. And impossible it is; yet Villari
achieves it, with an audacity that leaves you breathless.

1 In his Niccolo Machiavelli.

No--he practically tells you--this Macchiavelli, who daily saw and spoke
with Cesare for two months (and during a critical time, which is when
men best reveal their natures), this acute Florentine--the acutest
man of his age, perhaps--who studied and analysed Cesare, and sent his
Government the results of his analyses, and was inspired by them later
to write The Prince--this man did not know Cesare Borgia. He wrote, not
about Cesare himself, but about a creation of his own intellect.

That is what Villari pretends. Macchiavelli, the rep