324	A BRIEF SURVEY OF HUMAN  HISTORY
trivance of the two (printing and paper) proved as useful
as the combination of the steam engine and coal two cen-
turies later. They resulted in a wonderful dissemination
and extension of the New Learning.
In the realm of literature the Italian Ariosto (1474-1533)
and Machiavelli (1469-1527), the Frenchmen Rabelais
(1490-1553) and Montaigne (1533-1592), the Spanish
Cervantes (1547-1616), and the English Spenser (1552-99),
Shakespeare (1564-1616), and Francis Bacon (1560-1626),
may be taken as representative writers. Ariosto was a
romantic poet, and in his Orlando Furioso he says,
Of ladies and of knights, of arms and love,
Of courtesy and of brave deeds I sing.
He inspired Spenser, Shakespeare, and the other Elizabethan
poets in England. Machiavelli, the author of The Prince and
The Art of War, was a politician devoid of any moral sense.
His name has become proverbial for " Realpolitik" or un-
scrupulous statecraft. Francis Bacon admiringly said : " We
are much beholden to Machiavelli and others that wrote
what men do and not what men ought to do." Caesar Borgia
(1476-1507), natural son of Pope Alexander VI, was the
embodiment of Machiavelli's ideal Prince : In the words
of Mr. H. G. Wells,
" Caesar was a youth of spirit even for the times in which
he lived; he had early caused his elder brother to be murdered,
and also the husband of his sister Lucrezia, He had, indeed,
betrayed and murdered a number of people. With his father's
assistance he had become duke of a wide area of Central Italy
when Machiavelli visited him. He had shown little or no military
ability, but considerable dexterity and administrative power. His
magnificence was of the most temporary sort. When presently
his father died, it collapsed like a pricked bladder. Its unsound-
ness was not evident to Machiavelli. Our chief interest in Caesar