or it ought to have given mee power, to have bene able to have executed it:  For now beeing olde, I cannot hope to have any occasion, to be able so to doo:  In consideration whereof, I have bene liberall with you who beeing grave young men, may (when the thinges said of me shall please you) at due times, in favoure of your Princes, helpe them and counsider them.  Wherin I would have you not to be afraied, or mistrustfull, because this Province seemes to bee altogether given to raise up againe the things deade, as is seene by the perfection that Poesie, painting, and writing, is now brought unto:  Albeit, as much as is looked for of mee, beeing strooken in yeeres, I do mistrust.  Where surely, if Fortune had heretofore graunted mee so much state, as suffiseth for a like enterprise, I would not have doubted, but in most short time, to have shewed to the world, how much the auncient orders availe:  and without peradventure, either I would have increased it with glory, or lost it without shame.’

[Sidenote:  The History of Florence.]

In 1520 Machiavelli was an ageing and disappointed man.  He was not popular with any party, but the Medici were willing to use him in minor matters if only to secure his adherence.  He was commissioned by Giulio de Medici to write a history of Florence with an annual allowance of 100 florins.  In 1525 he completed his task and dedicated the book to its begetter, Pope Clement VII.

In the History, as in much of his other work, Machiavelli enriches the science of humanity with a new department.  ’He was the first to contemplate the life of a nation in its continuity, to trace the operation of political forces through successive generations, to contrast the action of individuals with the evolution of causes over which they had but little control, and to bring the salient features of the national biography into relief by the suppression of comparatively unimportant details.’  He found no examples to follow, for Villani with all his merits was of a different order.  Diarists and chroniclers there were in plenty, and works of the learned men led by Aretino, written in Latin and mainly rhetorical.  The great work of Guicciardini was not published till years after the Secretary’s death.  Machiavelli broke away from the Chronicle or any other existing form.  He deliberately applied philosophy to the sequence of facts.  He organised civil and political history.  He originally intended to begin his work at the year 1234, the year of the return of Cosimo il Vecchio from exile and of the consolidation of Medicean power on the ground that the earlier periods had been covered by Aretino and Bracciolini.  But he speedily recognised that they told of nothing but external wars and business while the heart of the history of Florence was left unbared.  The work was to do again in very different manner, and in that manner he did it.  Throughout he maintains and insistently insinuates his unfailing explanation of