peak of the two greatest masters of practical and
theoretical statecraft--Francesco Guicciardini and Niccolo Machiavelli.
These two writers combine all the distinctive qualities of the
Florentine historiographers in the most eminent perfection. At the same
time they are, not merely as authors but also as men, mirrors of the
times in which they both played prominent parts. In their biographies
and in their works we trace the spirit of an age devoid of moral
sensibility, penetrative in analysis, but deficient in faith, hope,
enthusiasm, and stability of character. The dry light of the intellect
determined their judgment of men, as well as their theories of
government. On the other hand, the sordid conditions of existence to
which they were subjected as the servants of corrupt states, or the
instruments of wily princes--as diplomatists intent upon the plans of
kings like Ferdinand or adventurers like Cesare Borgia, privy councilors
of such Popes as Clement VII. and such tyrants as Duke Alessandro de'
Medici--distorted their philosophy and blunted their instincts. For the
student of the sixteenth century they remain riddles, the solution of
which is difficult, because by no strain of the imagination is it easy
to place ourselves in their position. One half of their written
utterances seem to be at variance with the other half. Their actions
often contradict their most brilliant and emphatic precepts; while
contemporaries disagree about their private character and public
conduct. All this confusion, through which it is now perhaps impossible
to discern what either Guicciardini or Machiavelli really was, and what
they really felt and thought, is due to the anomaly of consummate
ability and unrivaled knowledge of the world existing without religious
or political faith, in an age of the utmost depravity of public and
private morals. No criticism could be more stringent upon the
contemporary disorganization of society in Italy than is the silent
witness of these men, sublimely great in all mental qualities, but
helplessly adrift upon a sea of contradictions and of doubts, ignorant
of the real nature of mankind in spite of all their science, because
they leave both goodness and beauty out of their calculations.

Francesco Guicciardini was born in 1482. In 1505, at the age of
twenty-three, he had already so distinguished himself as a student of
law that he was appointed by the Signoria of Florence to read the
Institutes in public.