n 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might be, and personal letters innumerable, and even yet unpublished,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
natural dignity