ADVANCEMENT OF LEARNING 273 



artifices as Machiavel speaks of, who directs men to have little 

 regard for virtue itself, but only for the show and public reputa- 

 tion of it : " Because," says he, " the credit and opinion of 

 virtue are a help to a man, but virtue itself a hindrance." 

 He also directs his politician to ground all his prudence on 

 this supposition, that men cannot be truly and safely worked 

 to his purpose but by fear, and therefore advises him to en- 

 deavor, by all possible means, to subject them to dangers and 

 difficulties. Whence his politician may seem to be what the 

 Italians call a sower of thorns. So Cicero cites this principle, 

 " Let our friends fall, provided our enemies perish ;" upon which 

 the triumvirs acted, in purchasing the death of their enemies by 

 the destruction of their nearest friends. So Catiline became 

 a disturber and incendiary of the state, that he might the better 

 fish his fortune in troubled waters, declaring, that if his fortune 

 was set on fire, he would quench it, not with water, but destruc- 

 tions And so Lysander would say, that children were to be 

 decoyed with sweetmeats and men by false oaths ; and there are 

 numerous other corrupt and pernicious maxims of the same 

 kind, more indeed, as in all other cases, than of such as are 

 just and sound. Now if any man delight in this corrupt or 

 tainted prudence, we deny not but he may take a short cut 

 to fortune, as being thus disentangled and set at large from 

 all restraint of laws, good-nature, and virtue, and having no 

 regard but to his own promotion though it is in life as in a 

 journey, where the shortest road is the dirtiest, and yet the 

 better not much about. 



But if men were themselves, and not carried away with the 

 tempest of ambition, they would be so far from studying these 

 wicked arts, as rather to view them, not only in that general 

 map of the world, which shows all to be vanity and vexation 

 of spirit,^ but also in that more particular one, which represents 

 a life separate from good actions as a curse; that the more 

 eminent this life, the greater the curse ; that the noblest reward 

 of virtue is virtue itself ; that the extremest punishment of vice is 

 vice itself ; and that as Virgil excellently observes, good actions 

 are rewarded, as bad ones also are punished by the conscious- 

 ness that attends them. 



" Qua? vobis, quae digna, viri, pro laudibus istis 

 Pnemia posse rear solvi? Pulcherrima primum 

 Dii moresque dabunt vestri." Virgil.' 

 18 



