, speaking the latent though unavowed ideals of an evil
generation of public men, was rewarded by being openly vilified and
secretly studied. He became the manual of statesmen and the bugbear of
moralists. While Catharine de' Medici, Thomas Cromwell and Francis
Bacon chewed, swallowed and digested his pages, the dramatist had only
to put in a sneer or an abusive sarcasm at the expense of the
Florentine--and there were very many such allusions to him on the
Elizabethan stage--to be sure of a round of applause from the audience.
While Machiavelli found few open defenders, efforts to refute him were
numerous. When Reginald Pole said that his works were written by the
evil one a chorus of Jesuits sang amen and the church put his writings
on the Index. The Huguenots were not less vociferous in opposition.
Among them Innocent Gentillet attacked not only his morals but his
talent, saying that his maxims were drawn from an observation of small
states only, and that his judgment of the policy suitable to large
nations was of the poorest.

{592} It is fair to try _The Prince_ by the author's own standards. He
did not purpose, in Bacon's phrase, to describe what men ought to be
but what they actually are; he put aside ethical ideas not as false but
as irrelevant. But this rejection was fatal even to his own purpose,
"for what he put aside . . . were nothing less than the living forces
by which societies subsist and governments are strong." [2] Calvin
succeeded where the Florentine failed, as Lord Morley points out,
because he put the moral ideal first.

[Sidenote: Erasmus]

The most striking contrast to Machiavelli was not forthcoming from the
camp of the Reformers, but from that of the northern humanists, Erasmus
and More. The _Institution of a Christian Prince_, by the Dutch
scholar, is at the antipodes of the Italian thesis. Virtue is
inculcated as the chief requisite of a prince, who can be considered
good only in proportion as he fosters the wealth and the education of
his people. He should levy no taxes, if possible, but should live
parsimoniously off his own estate. He should never make war, save when
absolutely necessary, even against the Infidel, and should negotiate
only such treaties as have for their principal object the prevention of
armed conflict.

Still more noteworthy than his moral postulates, is Erasmus's
preference for the republican form of government. In the _Christian
Prince_, dedicated as i