On the 22nd of June, four hundred years ago, Niccolo Machiavelli died at San Casciano, not far from Florence, where he had lived since his dismissal from the office of Secretary to the Florentine Republic in 1512. A typical representative of his times, although his life, habits and ideals were those of a pagan, he died a Christian death : all the neo-pagans of the Italian Renaissance did the same. It was the fashion.

A broken and disappointed man, discarded by the Medici, to whom in vain he had offered his services and experience, ready to sacrifice his political convictions if they could employ him, were it only in rolling a stone,’ suspected by his old political friends as one who fawned on princes and a traitor to the Republican cause, Machiavelli passed the last few years of his life cursing fate, fighting against poverty and chafing under this enforced idleness, which to a man of his undoubted capabilities, accustomed for many a year to transact diplomatic business with the most renowned princes of the epoch, must have been truly unbearable. It is with pity and sympathy, not unmingled with a sense of disgust, that one reads Machiavelli’s own account of how he used to pass his days in the semiexile of San Casciano. Rising at dawn, after passing a couple of hours in the woods of the estate he used to go and sit by a spring reading Dante, Petrarch, Tibullus and Ovid, meditating pleasantly on ‘their amorous transports and the history of their loves’ ; thence betaking himself to an inn by the roadside to gossip with passers-by and ‘note the varied tastes and diverse fancies of mankind. . . . Dinner over, I go back to the inn.