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‘Be ruled by me, for in extremity
We ought to make bar of no policy.’^[1]

To these add this aphorism from Machiavelli’s equally sagacious, and almost equally learned and able, countryman and contemporary, Guicciardini—an aphorism supported by words from Thucydides, Polybius, Lucan, and others, and by citation of a lesson from History: ‘The vicissitude of things and change of times, begets new counsailes and deliberations in States, and enforceth necessarily the knitting or dissolving of Alliance between them. What is usefull to day, may be hurtfull to morrow, as showers that are seasonable in the Spring, and unwelcome in the Harvest. Wherefore, to temporise by levelling and adapting our actions to the occasion present and presented, is requisite policy.’^[2] Gather these sententiae; or

And wet my cheeks with artificial tears,
And frame my face to all occasions.
. . .
I’ll play the orator as well as Nestor,
. . .
I can add colours to the chameleon,
Change shapes with Proteus for advantages,
And set the murd’rous Machiavel to school.’
‘Noe times have bene without badd men’, wrote Spenser, in A View of the Present State of Ireland (Globe ed. (1890), 675); and its author, as became a representative Elizabethan, was not without knowledge and appreciation of the ‘rugged brow of carefull Policy’ of a Christopher Hatton, a Francis Walsingham, the Lord Burleigh, and others. In places unexpected and expected one comes upon evidence of the use made of Machiavelli’s name within the century following the publication of The Prince. In a record of the Star Chamber for 1595 a scoundrel and turncoat is described as ‘a most palpable Machiavellian’ (cited by Cheyney, A History of England from the Defeat of the Armada to the Death of Elizabeth, (1914), i. 141).
1. Barabas, Act I. sc. 2.
2. Aphorismes Civill and Militarie . . . out of the first Quarterne of Fr. Guicciardine (R. Dallington), 2nd ed., 1629, 316–17. See also Counsels and Reflections of Francesco Guicciardini, translated from the Italian by Ninian Hill Thomson, 1890, e.g. Nos. 6, 30 (Fortuna: ‘Whoso well considers