XLIX. From all that has been said on this subject, it is evident and plain, that with an equality of talents, those politicians who proceed upon the principles of honesty, and who pursue the road of rectitude and truth, will with greater certainty, and more ease, attain their ends, than those, who follow the rout of artifice and deceit; for the first, is the sound or true policy, the other, the rotten or false. THE MACHIAVELIANISM OF THE ANCIENTS. SECT. I. I. As we are about to treat in this discourse of the tyrannic doctrine of Machiavel; I believe it will be agreeable to the greatest part of our readers, to have some particular information respecting this man, of whom all the world talks, and whom all the world detests; for by whatever means men make themselves famous, they excite a curiosity to know who and what they were. II. Nicholas Machiavel, who was a native of Florence, lived in the beginning of the sixteenth century, and was a man of more than middling ingenuity. He wrote the Tuscan language with elegance and propriety, although his knowledge of the Latin was but moderate. He had a good genius for writing comic poetry, which he manifested in various pieces which he wrote for the theatre; and more particularly in one of them, that was represented at Florence with such great applause, that it excited Pope Leo the tenth, as Paulus Jovius informs us, to cause it to be acted at Rome by the same players, and with the same dresses and decorations, with which it had been exhibited at Florence. When the unhappy conspiracy against the family of the Medicis, was set on foot by the Soderinis, Machiavel, who was impeached as an accomplice in it, was put to the question by torture; but either his fortitude, or his innocence, caused him to resist the rigour of that trial without making the least confession. I do not know whether it was before, or after this event, that he was made secretary to the republic, but it is certain, that for the title of historian to it, which was conferred on him together with a good salary, he was totally indebted to the favour of the Medicis; but whether they did this from a conviction of his innocence with respect to the late conspiracy, and were disposed to recompence him by this honourable emolument, for the injury he suffered in the torture; or whether they did it from considering him as an able man whom they had a mind to keep under obligations to them, in order to avail themselves of so good a pen as Machiavel’s in their favour; I say, whichever of these motives they were actuated by, is not quite certain.