it expresses nothing, seems to discern everything, cheeks pale
with thought and sedentary habits, lips formed with feminine
delicacy, but compressed with more than masculine decision, mark
out men at once enterprising and timid, men equally skilled in
detecting the purposes of others, and in concealing their own,
men who must have been formidable enemies and unsafe allies,
but men, at the same time, whose tempers were mild and equable,
and who possessed an amplitude and subtlety of intellect which
would have rendered them eminent either in active or in
contemplative life, and fitted them either to govern or to
instruct mankind.

Every age and every nation has certain characteristic vices,
which prevail almost universally, which scarcely any person
scruples to avow, and which even rigid moralists but faintly
censure. Succeeding generations change the fashion of their
morals, with the fashion of their hats and their coaches; take
some other kind of wickedness under their patronage, and wonder
at the depravity of their ancestors. Nor is this all. Posterity,
that high court of appeal which is never tired of eulogising its
own justice and discernment, acts on such occasions like a Roman
dictator after a general mutiny. Finding the delinquents too
numerous to be all punished, it selects some of them at hazard,
to bear the whole penalty of an offence in which they are not
more deeply implicated than those who escape, Whether decimation
be a convenient mode of military execution, we know not; but we
solemnly protest against the introduction of such a principle
into the philosophy of history.

In the present instance, the lot has fallen on Machiavelli, a man