have been denounced, and the author punished, by one of those illustrious characters whom it so nearly concerned, Lorenzo de Medicis, Pope Clement the VIIth, or Leo the Tenth.
It was Clement the VIIIth who first raised the senseless outcry against Machiavelli, for he was told that Machiavelli had been an enemy to the temporal power of the Popes. Fired with that holy zeal and resentment for which the Church of Rome has been so conspicuous, he proscribed his works, and ordered them to be carefully perused, to discover whether there were not passages in them which could be laid hold of as contrary to the principles of religion.
The task was not difficult: they easily found more than they wanted, and on the strength of their discoveries they did not hesitate to pronounce Machiavelli the most execrable of men; and when we consider the power of a Pope at that period, over the "intellectual faculties of mankind, at at once, vice-God, kingly priest, sacred
