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"women detest the books which the collector desires and admires. First, they don't understand them; second, they are jealous of their mysterious charms; third, books cost money; and it really is a hard thing for a lady to see money expended on what seems a dingy old binding, or yellow paper scored with crabbed characters. Thus many married men are reduced to collecting Elzevirs, which go readily into the pocket, for you cannot smuggle a folio volume easily."

This and our other citations from Mr. Lang's charming little volume render much encomium of it unnecessary. It must not be regarded as an exhaustive guide to the building and furnishing of a library; indeed, the author seems somewhat to scorn these minutiæ. But for enthusiasm, knowledge, and happy anecdote the book is unrivalled among its kind. Where Lowndes and Dibdin are dull, it is pleasant and sparkling, a grateful book for the veteran book-collector, an indispensable one to the beginner. Mr. Austin Dobson's chapter on modern illustrated English books which is appended is excellent, and is illustrated with some of the dainty woodcuts which he commends. Perhaps these authors will think the highest praise of their work to be that every bibliophile, after reading it to the last page with delight, it may safely be asserted, will accord it a permanent place in the apartment from which it derives its name.

M. G. WATKINS.

MACCHIAVELLI'S "GOLDEN ASS.”

THE

HE Church of Santa Croce, says Byron in one of his letters, contains much illustrious nothing. There, in the Westminster Abbey of Italy, in the good society of Michael Angelo, Galileo, and Alfieri, lie the particles which have relapsed to chaos of the sublime Nicolo Macchiavelli. Doubt clings about him like a garment, and begins with the spelling of his name. Its orthography, like that of Shakespeare, is unsettled. Byron may be right in spelling it Niccolo Machiavelli, but he is certainly wrong in finding fault with his monument for containing no information about the time of his death. The Obiit Anno A.P.V. MDXXVII, is distinct. It was erected, according to one authority, by the Grand Duke Leopold; according to another, by a certain Lord Nassau-Clavering Count Cowper. Such are the contradictions clustering about a man whose fate it seems was to be misunderstood. For two centuries and a half he was thought unworthy of any lapidary notice whose sepulchre now bears the line

Tanto nomini nullum par elogium.

Up to the present period, nevertheless, that name has been oppressed by the weight of a popular anathema maranatha, and the able and devoted patriot, whose sweetest dream was the unity and liberty of his country, has been stigmatised as the laureate of cruelty and falsehood. It was, as Moore says, ever thus. Even in the age of Elizabeth we find two of his greatest contemporaries speaking of him in opposite terms. With Shakespeare he is all that is bad. The great poet but reflects the popular verdict when, in the "Merry Wives of Windsor," mine host of the Garter Inn uses his name as the synonym of subtlety and fraud; or again, when, in the third part of Henry VI., Gloucester talks of setting the murderous Machiavel to school. Bacon, on the other hand, thinks him worthy of all thanks and praise, and in his De Augmentis chronicles the debt due to him from mankind as one of those who have openly, and without dissimulation, shown us not what men ought to do, but what they do. With the character of Macchiavelli this paper is not concerned. Whether he wrote with the finger of Satan, as a church dignitary,

with more indignation than intelligence, affirmed, it does not consider; it is occupied only with one of his works.

Some sort of biography is, however, de rigueur, whether its author be regarded as a man or an artist, as a diplomatist or a poet. It is well to make it as short as may be. Nicolo Macchiavelli, or Macchiavegli, as his name was originally, perhaps-for in this matter of spelling all is uncertain-spelt, was born in Florence in 1469, and there "his earth returned to whence it rose." He is supposed to have died of despair or poison. This matter, like many another circumstance in his life's story, is, as Milton says, a "covered field," in which his biographers delight to combat. He was married, probably, from his novel of "Belphegor," unhappily, but this too is not sure, and had five children. He was of middle height, and his complexion was dark and adust as that of the hero of Cervantes. He was secretary of the ten magistrates of liberty and peace in the little republic of Florence for fifteen years, and so is commonly called the Florentine Secretary. He wrote official letters, registered the decrees of the executive, and was despatched on some five-and-twenty diplomatic matters, of which he has given a full account in his "Legations." He held, in fact, the supreme power in his native town. On the return of the Medici he was banished, and possibly tortured-another bone for biography. Certainly, he says in a letter to one of his friends, that it is a miracle he is alive, and that it is only God and his innocence that have saved him. He complains of the ills of imprisonment, but speaks in no explicit terms of torture. Compulsory leisure bore to him literary fruit, as it bore to Milton. The evil wind of exile, if it be an evil wind, blew him the good, if it be a good, of an immortal fame. His political labours left him little leisure for literary composition. He had written nothing, save a few poems and the "Legations." But in the first year of his banishment he composed for the world that celebrated work with which his name is chiefly associated, a work so often quoted and so seldom read, the celebrated "Prince," which has been held now a satire against tyrants, and now a manual of tyranny. The same year also produced his "Treatise on the Art of War." In the next he wrote his "Discourses on Livy," which, with "The Prince," form his two political chefs d'œuvre. These prove his right to the title of an illustrious statesman, as his Florentine histories to that of an eminent historian. Nicolo Macchiavelli was an universal genius. He possessed an extraordinary flexibility of talent. Besides his works on politics, history, diplomacy, and war, he wrote several capital comedies, and a philosophic tale, not unworthy of Boccaccio, and admitted a model

But

of Italian prose. He also wrote some poems, among which that of the "Golden Ass" is pre-eminent. It lies among them, however, neglected and forgotten. Those of the Italian critics who have noticed it, have spoken of it, almost without exception, in terms of fervent praise. Macaulay calls it "not altogether destitute of merit," allows it considerable ingenuity in its allegory and some vivid colouring in its descriptions, but there an end. To damn with faint praise, just hint a fault and hesitate dislike, was not the exclusive province of Addison. Macchiavelli cannot, indeed, be placed as a poet in the first rank either with Dante or with Ariosto. Like Cervantes or Muhammad, he was fond of poetry, and sought by study to become a poet. But poetry is a gift of the gods. This truth in the case of the Arabic legislator is recognised in a Surat of the Koran-"We have not taught him poetry, neither does it suit him." Still, the "Golden Ass" has sometimes poetic charms, and many times charms of another category.

In the last canto of the "Orlando Furioso," the poet of Ferrara congratulates himself on the happy conclusion of his work. I am, he says, if my chart be correct, hard by my harbour, and must soon pay my vows upon the shore. He imagines with ingenuous modesty a scene of general satisfaction. Fair ladies and brave men crowd the landing-place to welcome his return. On every available jut or coigne of vantage is perched some prince or poet to do him honour. Here is the beautiful Ippolita Sforza, to whom Bandello dedicated his first novel, and there is the learned and ill-fated Julia Gonzaga. Here is the divine poet, the scourge of kings, Pietro Aretino, and there Jacobo Sannazar, who brought down the muses from the high mountain to the sandy plain. He speaks of a Nicolo Tiepoli, and a Nicolo Amaino, more remarkable, both of them, from the regard of Ariosto than for their own rhymes, but never a word says he about Nicolo Macchiavelli. The Florentine secretary seems to have taken umbrage at the omission. In a letter to Lodovico Alamanni, written a little before the Christmas of 1517, we read: “I have seen Ariosto's poem, and think it a beautiful work throughout, and in some parts an admirable one. Commend me to the author, if he be in Rome, and tell him my sole regret is, that having mentioned so many poets, he has left me out as a and that he has done for me in his 'Orlando' what I will not do for him in my 'Ass.'" The blank, hiatus valde deflendus, in this epistle is due to the delicate and amiable care of some worthy Bowdler, whose conscientious scruples led him to efface for the welfare of posterity whatever in the collected MSS. of Macchiavelli seemed to his omniscient judgment

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free or irreligious, sarcastic or impure. The good man did his work so effectually, by scratching out with a knife, as to make the unhappy letters look like a Gruyère cheese, and to set all hope of restoring their text at an infinite distance. What Macchiavelli did for Ariosto in the "Ass," it is not easy to determine. He may have intended to say something about him in those chapters of the poem which were unhappily never written, or he may have forgotten all about his promise, like Ginguené, who, after considering the other works of our author, tells his readers he will speak elsewhere of the "Golden Ass," but never does so. However, the letter gives at least some sort of a clue to the date of the composition of the poem. It was certainly written after what is called his disgrace, and was his disillusion, dans les sentiers déserts de San Casciano, where, as De Musset says in his Vœux Stériles, the sound of his footsteps echoes still under the burning skies.

The "Golden Ass" is evidently built after the model of Dante's "Inferno." It corresponds with it in form, and matter, and end. It is composed in Dante's tercets, Macchiavelli's favourite verse. Its style is energetic and rough, as the style of Dante; its situations. are often parallel to the situations of Dante, and the words not infrequently are Dante's own words. It is indeed humble as the Divine Comedy is sublime. The first colloquy of Dante after his speech to Virgil, his guide, is with the fair Francesca. Macchiavelli's first conversation after a talk with his guide is with a filthy pig. The "Ass" has therefore been regarded as a parody of the "Inferno." Macchiavelli, indeed, had censured Dante for calling the language of his poem Curial instead of Florentine, and differed from him widely in his view of the respect owing to their common country. Perhaps there is not enough of the poem to determine its true nature. It is a mere fragment of eight cantos or chapters, as the author calls them; only a prelude to the fuller music which might have been. There is no trace in it of any transformation of the author into an ass. It has, therefore, little except in name to do with the works of Lucian and Apuleius, with which it has nevertheless been compared by some of that large class of critics who are able, probably by what Professor Tyndall calls a scientific use of the imagination, to write criticisms of pages they have never read. It is not Addison alone who can evolve out of his inner consciousness a very confident and discriminative character of Spenser without having read a line of him. The "Golden Ass" bears, as far as it goes, rather a relation to the Homeric tale of "Circe." The author proposes to sing the pain and sorrow he suffered under the

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