Machiavelli sneers at Gianpaolo Baglioni because he had not the courage to strangle his guest Julius II.

and to crown his other crimes with this signal act of magnanimity.

What virtue had come to mean in the Italian language we have seen already.

The one quality which every one despised was simplicity, however this might be combined with lofty genius and noble aims.

It was because Soderini was simple and had a good heart that Machiavelli wrote the famous epigram-- La notte che mori Pier Soderini L' alma n' ando dell' inferno alla bocca; E Pluto le grido: Anima sciocca, Che inferno?
va nel limbo de' bambini.
The night that Peter Soderini died, His soul flew down unto the mouth of hell: 'What?
Hell for you?
You silly spirit!' cried The fiend: 'your place is where the babies dwell.' As of old in Corcyra, so now in Italy, 'guilelessness, which is the principal ingredient of genuine nobleness, was laughed down, and disappeared.'[1] What men feared was not the moral verdict of society, pronouncing them degraded by vicious or violent acts, but the intellectual estimate of incapacity and the stigma of dullness.