One half of their written utterances seem to be at variance with the other half.

Their actions often contradict their most brilliant and emphatic precepts; while contemporaries disagree about their private character and public conduct.

All this confusion, through which it is now perhaps impossible to discern what either Guicciardini or Machiavelli really was, and what they really felt and thought, is due to the anomaly of consummate ability and unrivaled knowledge of the world existing without religious or political faith, in an age of the utmost depravity of public and private morals.

No criticism could be more stringent upon the contemporary disorganization of society in Italy than is the silent witness of these men, sublimely great in all mental qualities, but helplessly adrift upon a sea of contradictions and of doubts, ignorant of the real nature of mankind in spite of all their science, because they leave both goodness and beauty out of their calculations.
Francesco Guicciardini was born in 1482.

In 1505, at the age of twenty-three, he had already so distinguished himself as a student of law that he was appointed by the Signoria of Florence to read the Institutes in public.