down unto the mouth of hell:
'What? Hell for you? You silly spirit!' cried
The fiend: 'your place is where the babies dwell.'

As of old in Corcyra, so now in Italy, 'guilelessness, which is the
principal ingredient of genuine nobleness, was laughed down, and
disappeared.'[1] What men feared was not the moral verdict of society,
pronouncing them degraded by vicious or violent acts, but the
intellectual estimate of incapacity and the stigma of dullness. They
were afraid of being reckoned among feebler personalities; and to escape
from this contempt, by the commission even of atrocities, had come to be
accounted manly. The truth, missed almost universally, was that the
supreme wisdom, the paramount virility, is law-abiding honesty, the
doing of right because right is right, in scorn of consequence. Nothing
appears more clearly in the memoirs of Cellini than this point, while
the Italian novels are full of matter bearing on the same topic. It is
therefore ridiculous to assume that an Italian judged of men or conduct
in any sense according to our standards. Pinturicchio and Perugino
thought it no shame to work for princes like the Baglioni and for Popes
like Alexander VI. Lionardo da Vinci placed his talents as an engineer
at the service of Cesare Borgia, and employed his genius as a musician
and a painter for the amusement of the Milanese Court, which must have
been, according to Corio's account, flagrantly and shamelessly corrupt.
Leo Battista Alberti, one of the most charming and the gentlest spirits
of the earlier Renaissance, in like manner lent his architectural
ability to the vanity of the iniquitous Sigismondo Malatesta. No: the
_Principe_ was not inconsistent with the general tone of Italian
morality; and Machiavelli cannot be fairly taxed with the discovery of a
new infernal method. The conception of politics as a bare art of means
to ends had grown up in his mind by the study of Italian history and
social customs. His idealization of Cesare Borgia and his romance of
Castruccio were the first products of the theory he had formed by
observation of the world he lived in. The _Principe_ revealed it fully
organized. But to have presented such an essay in good faith to the
despots of his native city, at that particular moment in his own career,
and under the pressure of trivial distress, is a real blot upon his
memory.

[1] Thuc. iii. 83. The whole of the passage about Corcyra in
the third book of Thucydi