What else Gregorovius opines--that Cesare was no Messiah of United Italy--is true enough. Cesare was the Messiah of Cesare. The well-being of Italy for its own sake exercised his mind not so much as the well-being of the horse he rode. He wrought for his own aggrandisement--but he wrought wisely; and, whilst the end in view is no more to be censured than the ambition of any man, the means employed are in the highest degree to be commended, since the well-being of the Romagna, which was not an aim, was, nevertheless, an essential and praiseworthy incident. When it can be shown that every other of those conquerors who cut heroic figures in history were purest altruists, it will be time to damn Cesare Borgia for his egotism. What Villari says, for the purpose of adding rhetorical force to his “brigand-chief”--that Cesare was no statesman and no soldier--is entirely of a piece with the rest of the chapter in which it occurs(1)--a chapter rich in sweeping inaccuracies concerning Cesare. But it is staggering to find the statement in such a place, amid Macchiavelli’s letters on Cesare, breathing an obvious and profound admiration of the duke’s talents as a politician and a soldier--an admiration which later is to go perilously near to worship. To Macchiavelli, Cesare is the incarnation of a hazy ideal, as is abundantly shown in The Prince. For Villari to reconcile all this with his own views must seem impossible. And impossible it is; yet Villari achieves it, with an audacity that leaves you breathless. 1 In his Niccolò Machiavelli. No--he practically tells you--this Macchiavelli, who daily saw and spoke with Cesare for two months (and during a critical time, which is when men best reveal their natures), this acute Florentine--the acutest man of his age, perhaps--who studied and analysed Cesare, and sent his Government the results of his analyses, and was inspired by them later to write The Prince--this man did not know Cesare Borgia. He wrote, not about Cesare himself, but about a creation of his own intellect. That is what Villari pretends. Macchiavelli, the representative of a power unfriendly at heart under the mask of the expedient friendliness, his mind already poisoned by all the rumours current throughout Italy, comes on this mission to Valentinois. Florence, fearing and hating Valentinois as she does, would doubtless take pleasure in detractory advices. Other ambassadors--particularly those of Venice--pander to their Governments’ wishes in this respect, conscious that there is a sycophancy in slander contrasted with which the ordinary sycophancy of flattery is as water to wine; they diligently send home every scrap of indecent or scandalous rumour they can pick up in the Roman ante-chambers, however unlikely, uncorroborated, or unconcerning the business of an ambassador.