A discourse to an unlearned prince (2)

But many kings and princes foolishly imitate those unskilful statuaries who think to make their images look

great and fierce if they make them much straddling, with distended arms, and open mouth. After the same manner they, by the grave tone of their voice, stern countenance, morose behavior, and living apart from all society, would affect a kind of majestic grandeur, not unlike those statues that without seem to be of an heroic and divine form. but within are filled with nothing but earth, stone and lead;—with this only difference, that the weight of these massy bodies renders them stable and unmovable; whereas unlearned princes, by their internal ignorance, are often shaken and overthrown, and in regard they do not build their power on a true basis and foundation, they fall together with it. For, as it is necessary at first that the rule itself should be right and straight, before those things that are applied to it can be rectified and made like unto it; so a potentate ought in the first place to learn how to govern his own passions and to endue his mind with a tincture of princely virtues, and afterwards to make his subjects conformable to his example. For it is not the property of one that is ready to fall himself to hinder another from tripping, nor of one that is rude and illiterate to instruct the ignorant; neither can a person govern that is under no government. But most men, being deceived by a false opinion, esteem it the chiefest good in ruling to be subject to no authority; and thus the Persian king accounted all his servants and slaves except his wife, whose master he ought more especially to have been.