The reason for this decadence of the arts from their splendour in the early decades of the century is not easy to assign; no one can say why genius spurts up in one spot or in one individual, why the brilliant Italian race should have achieved so many masterpieces and then have become ineffectual. One can merely notice, whether as a cause or an accompanying phenomenon, that, with individual exceptions,--no man could be nobler than Michelangelo,--Italy of the High Renaissance was a great moral failure. In intellectual achievement the Italians eclipsed the world; in morality they stumbled about like blind men. This lack of morality finds its fullest expression, at least its most conspicuous expression, at the very time of the culmination of the arts. Let me illustrate. The night that the Duke of Gandia, son of Pope Borgia, was murdered in Rome (1497), a wood-seller, living beside the Tiber, saw several men come cautiously to the river. They peered about and made a sign to some one behind. Up came a horseman, with a dead body lying across his horse's back, head and heels dangling down; the horse was turned rump to the river, and two men on foot seized the body and flung it into the water. The wood-seller was asked why he had not reported the fact. He answered that he had seen some hundred bodies thrown into the river at that spot, and had never heard any inquiries made. The duke's brother, Caesar, was at the time believed to have done the deed, but evidence fails. The same Caesar Borgia, bearing the somewhat ambitious motto _Aut Caesar aut nihil_, energetic, ruthless, vigorous, ingenious, and plausible, embodied the Italian conception of what a political leader should be; so much so, that Machiavelli, the greatest of Italian political writers, cites him as a model. Machiavelli was a patriot, animated by real love of his country, but he was free from our conceptions of morality, or perhaps sceptical of Italian virtue, and believed that the achievement of liberating Italy from foreign tyranny could only be accomplished by the qualities of an Iago. In the chapter in "The Prince" entitled "In what manner Princes should keep faith," he says: "How praiseworthy it is for a Prince to keep faith, to practise integrity and eschew trickery, everybody knows; nevertheless, within our own lifetime and our own experience, we know that those Princes have done great things who have made small account of good faith and have known how to turn men's heads by means of trickery, and in the end have surpassed those who planted themselves on loyalty.... Therefore a prudent lord ought not to keep faith, when keeping faith would make against him, and the reasons which made him promise are no more. If men were all good this precept would not be good; but as they are bad and would not keep faith with you, you, too, ought not to keep faith with them; and a Prince will never lack legitimate reasons to colour the breach.... I shall even make bold to