xxi. 148) are not elaborated descriptively; they are summed up as

indicative of the habit of the time. So is handled (VII. xxxiii. 162) Professor Cola Montano’s doctrinaire enthusiasm for republics and scorn of tyrants. His pupils find the issue in assassination. The splendid audience of the Pope (VIII. xxxvi. 218) to the ambassadors of Florence for reconciliation is at once description and argument. Thus the progress of the _Istorie fiorentine_ is simultaneously of facts and of ideas. It is analyzed narrative.

Fused also is the style. Heightened for the orations (II. xxxiv; III. v, xi, xiii, xxiii; IV. xxi; V. viii, xi, xxi, xxiv; VI. xx; VII. xxiii; VIII. x), it is never decorated, never diffused, so ascetically conformed to its message as never to obtrude. This is not negatively the art that knows how to conceal itself, but positively the art that is devoted singly. True in the choice of words, it is expert in the telling emphasis of sentences. Its reasoned balances suffice without the empty iteration of English euphuism. They are played never for display, always for point. The Latin period, welcome to the habit of Macchiavelli’s mind, is rarely pushed to a conformity that would in the vernacular have seemed artificial. Macchiavelli’s sentences are in logic fifty years ahead of the French and the English; but they do not force his own vernacular.