the irritations of Louis xii.  Many similar and lesser missions follow.  The results are in no case of great importance, but the opportunities to the Secretary of learning men and things, intrigue and policy, the Court and the gutter were invaluable.  At the camp of Caesar Borgia, in 1502, he found in his host that fantastic hero whom he incarnated in The Prince, and he was practically an eye-witness of the amazing masterpiece, the Massacre of Sinigaglia.  The next year he is sent to Rome with a watching brief at the election of Julius ii., and in 1506 is again sent to negotiate with the Pope.  An embassy to the Emperor Maximilian, a second mission to the French King at Blois, in which he persuades Louis xii. to postpone the threatened General Council of the Church (1511), and constant expeditions to report upon and set in order unrestful towns and provinces did not fulfil his activity.  His pen was never idle.  Reports, despatches, elaborate monographs on France, Germany, or wherever he might be, and personal letters innumerable, and even yet unpublished, ceased not night nor day.  Detail, wit, character-drawing, satire, sorrow, bitterness, all take their turn.  But this was only a fraction of his work.  By duty and by expediency he was bound to follow closely the internal politics of Florence where his enemies and rivals abounded.  And in all these years he was pushing forward and carrying through with unceasing and unspeakable vigour the great military dream of his life, the foundation of a National Militia and the extinction of Mercenary Companies.  But the fabric he had fancied and thought to have built proved unsubstantial.  The spoilt half-mutinous levies whom he had spent years in odious and unwilling training failed him at the crowning moment in strength and spirit:  and the fall of the Republic implied the fall of Machiavelli and the close of his official life.  He struggled hard to save himself, but the wealthy classes were against him, perhaps afraid of him, and on them the Medici relied.  For a year he was forbidden to leave Florentine territory, and for a while was excluded from the Palazzo.  Later his name was found in a list of Anti-Medicean conspirators.  He was arrested and decorously tortured with six turns of the rack, and then liberated for want of evidence.

[Sidenote:  After his Fall.]

For perhaps a year after his release the Secretary engaged in a series of tortuous intrigues to gain the favour of the Medici.  Many of the stories may be exaggerated, but none make pleasant reading, and nothing proved successful.  His position was miserable.  Temporarily crippled by torture, out of favour with the Government, shunned by his friends, in deep poverty, burdened with debt and with a wife and four children, his material circumstances were ill enough.  But, worse still, he was idle.  He had deserved well of the Republic, and had never despaired of it, and this was his reward.  He seemed to himself a broken man.  He had no great