Florentine poet had the right to dream that his country was invested
with a providential mission, that his people was a chosen people,
which, by its own fault and by the fault of others, had lost its way,
but would find it again. Such was Dante's so-called Ghibelline
programme--less Ghibelline than intensely and magnificently Italian.
His was a mind too mighty to be caged within the limits of partisan
ambitions. The same may be said of Machiavelli. He also imagined, or
rather discerned in the future, a regenerate Italy under a single
head, and this, not the advancement of any particular man, was the
grand event he endeavoured to hasten. With the impatience of a heart
consumed by the single passion of patriotism, he conjured his
fellow-countrymen to seize the first chance that presented itself,
promising or unpromising, of reaching the goal. The concluding passage
in the _Principe_ was meant as an exhortation; it reads as a prophecy.
'We ought not therefore,' writes Machiavelli, 'to let this occasion
pass whereby, after so long waiting, Italy may behold the coming of a
saviour. Nor can I express with what love he would be received in all
those provinces which have suffered from the foreign inundations; with
what thirst of vengeance, with what obstinate faith, with what
worship, with what tears! What doors would be closed against him? What
people would deny him obedience? What jealousy would oppose him? What
Italian would not do him honour? The barbarous dominion of the
stranger stinks in the nostrils of all.'

Another man of genius, an Italian whom a fortuitous circumstance made
the citizen and the master of a country not his own, grasped both the
vital necessity of unity from an Italian point of view, and the
certainty of its ultimate achievement. Napoleon's notes on the
subject, written at St Helena, sum up the whole question without
rhetoric but with unanswerable logic:--'Italy is surrounded by the