No More Learning

--The vulgar are commonly ill-natured,
and always grudging against their governors: which makes that a prince
has more business and trouble with them than ever Hercules had with the
bull or any other beast; by how much they have more heads than will be
reined with one bridle. There was not that variety of beasts in the ark,
as is of beastly natures in the multitude; especially when they come to
that iniquity to censure their sovereign's actions. Then all the
counsels are made good or bad by the events; and it falleth out that the
same facts receive from them the names, now of diligence, now of vanity,
now of majesty, now of fury; where they ought wholly to hang on his
mouth, as he to consist of himself, and not others' counsels.

_Princeps_. --After God, nothing is to be loved of man like the prince; he
violates Nature that doth it not with his whole heart. For when he hath
put on the care of the public good and common safety, I am a wretch, and
put off man, if I do not reverence and honour him, in whose charge all
things divine and human are placed. Do but ask of Nature why all living
creatures are less delighted with meat and drink that sustains them than
with venery that wastes them? and she will tell thee, the first respects
but a private, the other a common good, propagation.

_De eodem_. --_Orpheus' Hymn_. --He is the arbiter of life and death: when he
finds no other subject for his mercy, he should spare himself. All his
punishments are rather to correct than to destroy. Why are prayers with
Orpheus said to be the daughters of Jupiter, but that princes are thereby
admonished that the petitions of the wretched ought to have more weight
with them than the laws themselves.

_De opt. Rege Jacobo_.
--It was a great accumulation to His Majesty's
deserved praise that men might openly visit and pity those whom his
greatest prisons had at any time received or his laws condemned.

_De Princ. adjunctis_. --_Sed vere prudens haud concipi possit Princeps_,
_nisi simul et bonus_. --_Lycurgus_. --_Sylla_. --_Lysander_. --_Cyrus_. --Wise is
rather the attribute of a prince than learned or good. The learned man
profits others rather than himself; the good man rather himself than
others; but the prince commands others, and doth himself.

The wise Lycurgus gave no law but what himself kept. Sylla and Lysander
did not so; the one living extremely dissolute himself, enforced
frugality by the laws; the other permitted those licenses to others which
himself abstained from. But the prince's prudence is his chief art and
safety. In his counsels and deliberations he foresees the future times:
in the equity of his judgment he hath remembrance of the past, and
knowledge of what is to be done or avoided for the present. Hence the
Persians gave out their Cyrus to have been nursed by a bitch, a creature
to encounter it, as of sagacity to seek out good; showing that wisdom may
accompany fortitude, or it leaves to be, and puts on the name of
rashness.

_De malign.