To Machiavelli belongs by acclaim the honor of having written the ideal biography of a State. His clear, straightforward, concise statement of conditions and characters as he saw then is a model for all writers of record. He was the first great Italian historian, and no man has ever been more ardent in his patriotism or a more earnest supporter of government for and by the people. The greatest tribute to his inflexible honesty of character is the fact that while no man had greater opportunities to enrich himself at the cost of the State, he died leaving his family in the greatest poverty. His varied political experience, and his assiduous study of classic writers, gave him the ability as well as the desire to write the history of his native State. Time has pronounced this History to be a classic worthy of preservation, and the perspective of time has also enabled us to form a juster and greater estimate of its author. The Ideal Republics and Empires that have been constructed from time to time by political dreamers have all the attractiveness of works like Pilgrim's Progress or Gulliver's Travels, combined with a philosophy and political insight that give them a double claim to be considered Classics. Modern progress may be more deeply indebted than we can estimate to the fantasies and airy castles of men like Rousseau, More, and Campanella. The four Ideal Republics or Governments described in this volume are perhaps the most famous of all, since they rank not only as great creations of the imagination but as literature of the highest class; and their writers have a further claim upon posterity from the fact that they helped to make history. The Third and concluding Section of the Library deals with that tremendous range of world-wide literature which we call, for want of a better name, Belles Lettres. Goethe contributes his brilliant and sagacious observations on men and things as he communicated them to Eckerman. Landor, of whom Swinburne has said that Milton alone stands higher, both in prose and verse, furnishes us with his Classical Conversations. Montesquieu and Goldsmith are drawn on for their Persian and Chinese Letters. Lord Chesterfield gives us the irony and hard-headed criticism combined with worldly common sense contained in the Letters to His Son, and the various names best known in French and English Belles Lettres yield what is greatest in them. Ottoman Literature, comprising Arabian, Persian, and Hebraic Poems, affords the reader an insight into the romantic and dramatic character of the Oriental. The Dabistan, possibly the most extraordinary book ever written in the East, finds itself at home in this section, while the Literature of the Hebrews is ideally represented in that most wonderful of all monuments of human wisdom, and perhaps folly, the "Talmud," together with the basis of modern metaphysics, the "Kabbala."