proposed expedients. Montesquieu tried to ascend to general principles, and drew from them consequences that were capable of explaining a long series of social phenomena. The Florentine secretary was a man of action, and reproduced in his writings the impressions that he had received from his intercourse with men and business. Montesquieu is always a man of the closet; he studies men in books.'—Sclopis, Revue Hist. de droit français et étranger (1856), ii. p. 18.
Comte has worked out the place of Montesquieu and of Machiavelli, Philos. Pos., iv. 178-185, and Pol. Pos. iii. 539.
13 La diplomatie au temps de Machiavel. Par Maulde-la-Clavière. 1892. 3 vols. i. 306, etc. The French gave the signal for the inevitable attack upon the ancient privileges of Latin as the language of diplomacy. At the beginning of the sixteenth century Spain strove to displace French, but did not succeed even when the Spanish power was at its meridian. In the East, the Turk would have nothing to do with Latin. A Turkish envoy to Venice in 1500, though acquainted with Latin, made it a point of honour only to speak Greek. Charles VIII. did not know Italian, and Louis XII. understood it with difficulty. Machiavelli preferred Italian to Latin.—Maulde-la-Clavière, ch. ii. and ch. vi.
14 I have used Mr. Symonds's translation, Age of the Despots, 244-6.
15 Thucydides, Bk. III. 82-4.
16 See Jacob Burckhardt's admirable work on the Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy (English translation by Middlemore), ii. 211. 'Was Germany in the fifteenth century so much better, with its godless wars against the Hussites, the crimes of the Vehmgericht, the endless feuds of the temporal princes, the shameless oppression of the wretched peasant?'—Thudichum, p. 68.
17 Translation of Benvenuto Cellini, Introduction, p. xvii.
18 Janet's Hist. de la Science Politique dans ses Rapports avec la Morale, i. 539 (3rd ed.).
