n ass!" (The Distracted State) dates from 1641. The English were getting cleverer. It may be that, having suitably diluted his creed for British use, and absorbed him, this "seeing through" would ensue. In Volpone (iv. 1) Jonson ridicules the popular scare. Chapman in All Fooles ridicules the popular conception of Machiavelli. But while it lasted the rage and counter-rage was immense: and it became a component of all subsequent English psychology, just as the Italian infatuation has never disappeared.
             But Machiavelli, "the bible of the queen-mother" (Catherine de' Medici), the bugbear of the Elizabethan stage, was at the same time the great formative influence, at once philosophic and political, throughout Europe; although it was only in England that he found a herd of poets to echo and advertise him. His influence must have been far more potent than that of Nietzsche. His bold ideas, falling on the sensitive and superstitious minds of the people only just out of the dusk of the Middle Ages, full of satanic fancies, had everywhere the greatest repercussion. In 1557 the Jesuits burned his works, and the Inquisition decreed their complete destruction. The Council of Trent confirmed the edict of the Inquisition....
             How the diabolical honesty of Nicolo Machiavelli should have shocked the world at large, and earned him an almost infamous notoriety, is easy to understand. Every organized duplicity felt itself unmasked by one of its own servants. It is doubly easy to see how in England the ungentlemanly frankness of this logician should have been regarded as a first-class scandal. Here was a political philosopher, trained in a small-scale imperialistic school amongst the little factious states of Italy, giving away the whole position of the ruler, and revealing even the very nature of all authority. The meaning of all political conquest, and the character of the people engaged in it, transpired with a start
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