provided with auxiliaries. There is Marpesia, through her fruitfulness,
inexhaustible of men, and men through her barrenness not only enured to
hardship, but in your arms. It may be said that Venice, excepting only
that she takes not in the people, is the most incomparable situation
of a commonwealth. You are Venice, taking in your people and your
auxiliaries too. My lords, the children of Israel were makers of brick
before they were builders of a commonwealth; but our brick is made,
our mortar tempered, the cedars of Lebanon are hewed and squared to our
hands. Has this been the work of man? Or is it in man to withstand this
work? 'Shall he that contends with the Almighty instruct him? He that
reproves God, let him answer it.' For our parts, everything is so laid
that when we come to have use of it, it is the next at hand; and unless
we can conceive that God and nature do anything in vain, there is no
more for us to do but to despatch. The piece which we have reached to us
in the foregoing orders, is the aristocracy. Athens, as has been shown,
was plainly lost through the want of a good aristocracy.

"But the sufficiency of an aristocracy goes demonstrably upon the hand
of the nobility or gentry; for that the politics can be mastered
without study, or that the people can have leisure to study, is a vain
imagination; and what kind of aristocracy divines and lawyers would
make, let their incurable running upon their own narrow bias and their
perpetual invectives against Machiavel (though in some places justly
reprovable, yet the only politician, and incomparable patron of the
people) serve for instruction. I will stand no more to the judgment
of lawyers and divines in this work, than to that of so many other
tradesmen; but if this model chances to wander abroad, I recommend it
to the Roman speculativi (the most complete gentlemen of this age)
for their censure; or with my Lord Epimonus his leave, send 300 or 400
copies to your agent at Venice to be presented to the magistrates there;
and when they have considered them, to be proposed to the debate of the
Senate, the most competent judges under heaven, who, though they have
great affairs, will not refuse to return you the oracle of their ballot.
The councillors of princes I will not trust; they are but journeymen.
The wisdom of these later times in princes' affairs (says Verulamius) is
rather fine deliveries and shiftings of dangers when they be near, than
solid and grounde