Essays and Lays of Ancient Rome Author:Thomas Babington Macaulay Macaulay Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: caricature ; and we are not certain that the best histories are not those in which a little of the exaggeration of fictitious narrative is judiciously employed. ... more »Something is lost in accuracy; but much is gained in effect. The fainter lines are neglected ; but the great characteristic features are imprinted on the mind for ever. The History terminates with the death of Lorenzo cle Medici. Machiavelli had, it seems, intended to continue his narrative to a later period. Hut his death prevented the execution of his design ; and the melancholy task of recording the desolation and shame of Italy devolved on Guicciardini. Machiavelli lived long enough to see the commencement of the last struggle for Florentine liberty. Soon after his death monarchy was finally established, not such a monarchy as that of which Cosmo had laid the foundations deep in the institutions and feelings of his countrymen, and which Lorenzo had embellished with the trophies of every science and every art ; but a loathsome tyranny, proud and mean, cruel and feeble, bigoted and lascivious. The character of Machiavelli was hateful to the new masters of Italy; and those parts of his theory which were in strict accordance with their own daily practice afforded a pretext for blackening his memory. His works were misrepresented by the learned, misconstrued by the ignorant, censured by the Church, abused with all the rancour of simulated virtue, by the tools of a base government, and the priests of a baser superstition. The name of the man whose genius had illuminated all the dark places of policy, and to whose patriotic wisdom an oppressed people had owed their last chance'of emancipation and revenge, passed into a proverb of infamy. Fot more than two hundred years his bones lay undistinguished. At length an English...« less