Note 185 — Chapter XI

It is painful to find an author of our age, and especially one of Sismondi's merited reputation and influence, so warped by anti-despotic feelings as to become the apologist of assassination. The phrase we use is startling, but surely not misapplied to those passages in vol. XI., pp. 44 to 47, and p. 114, where, by innuendo, if not by argument, motives which led to the murder of Galeazzo Maria, and two years later to that of Giuliano de' Medici, are shielded from infamy by ingenious special-pleading, worthy the pen of Machiavelli or the morality of Loyola. I refer to the comments of Roscoe in his volume of Additional Illustrations to his Lorenzo de' Medici, pp. 114 to 119.