Machiavelli. Thomas Babington Macaulay. 1909-14. English Essays: Sidney to Macaulay. The Harvard Classics

Machiavelli. Thomas Babington Macaulay. 1909-14. English Essays: Sidney to Macaulay. The Harvard Classics: "It is indeed scarcely possible for any person, not well acquainted with the history and literature of Italy, to read without horror and amazement the celebrated treatise which has brought so much obloquy on the name of Machiavelli. Such a display of wickedness, naked yet not ashamed, such cool, judicious, scientific atrocity, seemed rather to belong to a fiend than to the most depraved of men. Principles which the most hardened ruffian would scarcely hint to his most trusted accomplice, or avow, without the disguise of some palliating sophism, even to his own mind, are professed without the slightest circumlocution, and assumed as the fundamental axioms of all political science."