ecting knife, and leaves it but a corpse to work
upon.
____

REYNARD THE FOX

In a recent dissatisfied perusal of Mr. Macaulay's
collected articles, we were especially offended by his
curious and undesirable Essay on Machiavelli. Declining
the various solutions which have been offered
to explain how a man supposed to be so great could
have lent his genius to the doctrine of "the Prince," he
has advanced a hypothesis of his own, which may or
may not be true, as an interpretation of Machiavelli's
character, but which, as an exposition of a universal
ethical theory, is as detestable as what it is brought
forward to explain ... We will not show Mr. Macaulay
the disrespect of supposing that he has unsuccessfully
attempted an elaborate piece of irony. It is possible that
he may have been exercising his genius with a paradox,
but the subject is not of the sort in which we can
patiently permit such exercises. It is hard work with
all of us to keep ourselves straight, even when we see
the road with all plainness as it lies out before us; and
clever men must be good enough to find something else
to amuse themselves with, instead of dusting our eyes
with sophistry.

In Mr. Macaulay's conception of human nature, the
basenesses and the excellencies of mankind are no more
than accidents of circumstance, the results of national
feeling and national capabilities; and cunning and
treachery, and lying, and such other "natural defences
of the weak against the strong," are in themselves
neither good nor bad, except as thinking makes them
so. They are the virtues of a weak people, and they
will be as much admired, and are as justly admirable;
they are to the full as compatible with the highest
graces and most lofty features of the heart and intellect,
as any of those opposite so called heroisms which we
are generally so unthinking as to allow to monopolize
the name .... Cunning is the only resource of the
feeble; and why may we not feel for victorious cunning
as strong a sympathy as for the bold, downright, open
bearing of the strong? . . . That there may be no
mistake in the essayist's meaning, that he may drive the
nail home into the English understanding, he takes an
illustration which shall be familiar to all of us in the
characters of Iago and Othello. To our northern
thought, the free and noble nature of the Moor is
wrecked through a single infirmity, by a fiend in the
human form. To one of Machiavelli's Italians, Iago