Page:Machiavelli, Romanes Lecture, 2 June 1897.djvu/58

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MACHIAVELLI

The latest list of the writings about Machiavelli is given by Tommasini, La Vita et Gli Scritti di N. M., i. 56-8. Sees also Villari, and Lord Acton's learned Introduction to the Prince.

Among the French contributions, Nourrisson's Machiavel (edition of 1883) seems much the most vigorous, in spite of occasional outbreaks of the curious and everlasting feeling between Frenchmen and Italians. Among political pamphlets may be named, Dialogue aux enfers, entre Machiavel et Montesquieu; ou la politique de Machiavel au 19 siècle: Par un Contemporain (1864)—an energetic exposure of the Second Empire.—Machiavel, et l'influence de sa doctrine, sur les opinions, les mœurs, de la politique de la France pendant la Révolution: par M. de Mazères; Paris, 1816—a royalist indictment of Machiavelli, as the inspirer alike of Jacobins and Bonaparte.

M. Tassin's Gianotti, sa vie, son temps, et ses doctrines (1869), published on the eve of the overthrow of the Second Empire, and seeming to use the Italian publicist mainly as a mask for condemning the French government of the day. Grianotti (1492-1572) was of Savonarola's school, and M. Tassin uses him as a foil for Machiavelli. Others of less quality are: Dante, Michel-Ange, Machiavel. Par C. Calemard de Lafayette. Paris, 1852.—Essai sur les œuvres et la doctrine de Machiavel. Par Paul Deltuf. Paris, 1867.—Machiavel, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Von Jacob Venedy. Berlin, 1850.—Written after the events of 1848 in Germany, the author's object being to show that the three writers named were the representatives of the only three possible systems of government, and of these three Machiavelli stands for all that is wicked and reactionary, Rousseau for progress and humanity. The book is composed, not from any scientific point of view, but to illustrate contemporary politics. Louis Philippe is said (p. 66) to be the greatest scholar that Machiavelli ever had, and there are a good many remarks on the death of 'Machiavellismus' in France and Germany, which have hardly been borne out by history since 1850.

3 Machiavelli and the Elizabethan Drama. Von Edward Meyer. Weimar, 1897, p. xi. The accomplished professor of poetry in this university, in the newly published volume of his most interesting and important History of English Poetry (ii. ch. 12), has shown how much Marlowe had studied Machiavelli, and states his view of the effect of this study as follows: 'What we find in Marlowe is Seneca's exaltation of the freedom of the human will, dissociated