By Thomas Babington Macaulay
(March 1827) _Oeuvres completes de MACHIAVEL, traduites par J. V. PERIER
Paris: 1825._
|THOSE who have attended to the practice of our literary tribunal are
well aware that, by means of certain legal fictions similar to those of
Westminster Hall, we are frequently enabled to take cognisance of cases
lying beyond the sphere of our original jurisdiction. We need hardly
say, therefore, that in the present instance M. Perier is merely a
Richard Roe, who will not be mentioned in any subsequent stage of the
proceedings, and whose name is used for the sole purpose of bringing
Machiavelli into court.
We doubt whether any name in literary history be so generally odious as
that of the man whose character and writings we now propose to consider.
The terms in which he is commonly described would seem to import that
he was the Tempter, the Evil Principle, the discoverer of ambition
and revenge, the original inventor of perjury, and that, before the
publication of his fatal Prince, there had never been a hypocrite, a
tyrant, or a traitor, a simulated virtue, or a convenient crime.
One writer gravely assures us that Maurice of Saxony learned all his
fraudulent policy from that execrable volume. Another remarks that since
it was translated into Turkish, the Sultans have been more addicted
than formerly to the custom of strangling their brothers. Lord Lyttelton
charges the poor Florentine with the manifold treasons of the house of
Guise, and with the massacre of St. Bartholomew. Several authors have
hinted that the Gunpowder Plot is to be primarily attributed to his
doctrines, and seem to think that his effigy ought to be substituted for
that of Guy Faux, in those processions by which the ingenious youth of
England annually commemorate the preservation of the Three Estates. The
Church of Rome has pronounced his works accursed things. Nor have our
own countrymen been backward in testifying their opinion of his merits.
Out of his surname they have coined an epithet for a knave, and out of
his Christian name a synonym for the Devil.=
````Nick Machiavel had ne’er a trick,
````Tho’ he gave his name to our old Nick.
`````Hudibras, Part iii. Canto i.=
[But, we believe, there is a schism on this subject among the
antiquarians.]
It is indeed scarcely possible for any person, not well acquainted
with the history and literature of Italy, to read without horror and
amazement the celebrated treatise which has brought so much obloquy on
the name of Machiavelli. Such a display of wickedness, naked yet not
ashamed, such cool, judicious, scientific atrocity, seemed rather to
belong to a fiend than to the most depraved of men. Principles which
the most hardened ruffian would scarcely hint to his most trusted
accomplice, or avow, without the disguise of some palliating
sophism, even to his own mind, are professed without the slightest
circumlocution, and assumed as the fundamental axioms of all political
science.