Pompey, all the world will respect your person, your virtue, and your power; and in spite of all Cæsar can do, after you have sustained the losses enumerated, which will be sufficient to excuse your conduct in the eye of the world, you will at last, by delivering up Pompey, be able to repair all your damage. LXVIII. This speech appeared to me proper to introduce here, not only for the entertainment of the reader, but for his benefit and caution also; for having in this discourse set forth so many maxims and examples of tyrannic policy, I was apprehensive, that some people of weak understandings, might persuade themselves, it would be convenient and useful to practise them, if I did not at the same time, together with the poison, administer the antidote, and shew by such an example, that the violent expedients which Machiavelianism proposes as convenient, are in general hurtful and pernicious, or at least insecure and not to be relied on, and that in the very cases in which they are represented to be necessary, there are others that might be hit upon, which would answer the purpose much better, and which would admit of reconciling the useful with the honest, provided there is an upright will to adopt them, and a clear understanding to search out and apply them; so that what they call refined policy, is nothing more than a political dross or scum, and the production of gross geniuses, who do not search deeper than the superficies of things. The Machiavelians, seldom attend to more than the immediate effect of the blow their malice meditates, without reflecting, that the political machine is many times disposed to move in such a variety of directions, that it often runs back on, and crushes him who first set it in motion. I have said before, and I repeat it again, that the instances of perverse politicians who have been happy for any length of time, are very few, and that those few, have seldom been blessed with more than a transient ray of the splendor of fortune; and have been almost all shipwrecked by a sudden change of the wind, when they thought themselves sailing on with a favourable gale, and in the most prosperous manner. What infatuation then is it, to pursue a course, where all the rocks in the track of it, are stained with the blood of unhappy sufferers? Or who, with any reasonable expectation of success, can hope to make his fortune, by following and adopting the maxims of Machiavel, knowing the author of them lived poor and despised, and died miserable and abhorred? Perhaps this impious politician, may not improperly be compared to the unhappy Phlegyas described by Virgil, who was not undeceived, till his being convinced of the delusion he had been under could be of no service to him, and who with bitter expressions of lamentation, and in a hideous tone of voice, proclaimed the error of his detestable maxims, to the whole miserable group of the damned: