constituent principles. He compared the effects which different revolutions had produced, according to the circumstances under which they had taken place; and he studied the conduct of the Romans in their civil and military capacities, &c. &c. From all which, he deduced a series of maxims, which ought continually to be kept in remembrance by the statesman and the warrior, by princes and the people.
He afterwards published his History of Florence, in which he again scattered those political flowers which have stamped him the greatest political writer of any age: but it was in the Prince, where all these maxims were concentrated, and where the superior genius of Machiavelli displayed itself in meridian splendour. There it was where he developed those ideas which were capable of hurling imbecility from the throne. For this reason, The Prince is esteemed the most dangerous of all our author's works; in some respects it is really so.—But why is it dangerous? Is it on account of the maxims it contains? Assuredly not. The
