ave in
such select and exotic schools as the Casa Gioiosa under Vittorino da
Feltre at Mantua. The oath of Arthur's knights would have seemed to them
mere superfluity of silliness. _Onore_ connoted credit, reputation, and
prowess. _Virtu_, which may be roughly translated as mental ability
combined with personal daring, set the standard and ruled opinion.
'Honour in the North was subjective: _Onore_ in Italy objective.'
Individual liberty, indeed, was granted in full to all, at the
individual's risk. The love of beauty curbed grossness and added
distinction. Fraud became an art and force a science. There is liberty
for all, but for the great ones there is licence. And when the day of
trial comes, it is the Churchmen and the Princes who can save neither
themselves nor man, nor thing that is theirs. To such a world was
Machiavelli born. To whom should he turn? To the People? To the Church?
To the Princes and Despots? But hear him:--

'There shall never be found any good mason, which will beleeve
to be able to make a faire image of a peece of marble ill hewed,
but verye well of a rude peece. Our Italian Princes beleeved,
before they tasted the blowes of the outlandish warre, that it
should suffice a Prince to know by writinges, how to make a
subtell aunswere, to write a goodly letter, to shewe in
sayinges, and in woordes, witte and promptenesse, to know how to
canvas a fraude, to decke themselves with precious stones and
gold, to sleepe and to eate with greater glory then other: To
kepe many lascivious persons about them, to governe themselves
with their subjects, covetously and proudely: To roote in
idlenes, to give the degrees of the exercise of warre for good
will, to dispise if any should have shewed them any laudable
waie, minding that their wordes should bee aunswers of oracles:
nor the sely wretches were not aware that they prepared
themselves to be a pray to whome so ever should assaulte them.
Hereby grew then in the thousand fowre hundred and nintie and
fowre yere, the great feares, the sodaine flightes and the
marveilous losses: and so three most mighty states which were in
Italie, have bene dievers times sacked and destroyed. But that
which is worse, is where those that remaine, continue in the
very same errour, and liev in the verie same disorder and
consider not, that those who in olde time would keepe their
states