Petrarch was the poet of the lethargic centuries, which came to an end when all Italy revived to the love of the Dantescan strain.'

Boccaccio is an object of outspoken aversion to our critic. While giving him praise for his fecundity of words and phrases, he denies him the merit of true eloquence or delicate mastery of language. He asserts him to be greater in narrative and description than imagery; to be false and unreal in feeling, meretricious in sentiment. Boccaccio, he says, could describe the pleasant hills and gardens of Schifanoia, with their bushes and rivulets, but Nature in her grand and terrible aspects was above his conceptions. The celebrated description of the Plague of Florence, however deserving of praise for its literary merits, is pronounced to be out of place, morally speaking, as the prelude to a series of libertine tales; and Boccaccio's authority as a master of Italian prose to have been only a decree of those degenerate times of the national literature when academical trivialities reigned paramount.

The Marquis Capponi's own execution as a writer is certainly as far as possible from that of which he accuses Boccaccio. We have spoken of his narrative style as communicative almost to the pitch of garrulity; but far from being showy or rhetorical, it is expressed with an antique simplicity akin to that of the original chroniclers, Villani and others, whose words be not unfrequently employs. His criticisms, on the other hand, are conveyed with incisive vigour; and his narrative itself is often varied by the insertion of terse dicta, moral or sentimental, which are very gems of expression, but which drive the translator's ingenuity to despair.

The remark of M. Thiers, that the Florentine Republic was the most democratic of all democracies, ancient or modern, applies to the working of its institutions. Theoretically, the community on the banks of the Arno had no rights but such as it derived from the Emperor of Germany. This, as historians of late have especially taken pains to prove, was the hypothesis on which all administrative power rested in the Christendom of the Middle Ages. Charlemagne and his descendants, and afterwards the Franconian, Saxon, and Swabian dynasties, were assumed to have stepped into the position once occupied by the Western successors of Constantine; and the idea that the Holy Roman Empire was de jure the sole fountain of authority in temporal matters, pervaded all legal and constitutional enactments; though so commonplace an assumption had it become, and so practically inoperative, that the historical student of a particular state or period might excusably fail to detect its existence.

The tradition, however, survived as long as the Republic lasted. In their official documents, the notaries and chancellors of the Republic were wont to style themselves imperiali auctoritate notarius; imperiali auctoritate judex. The adage un Dio, un Papa, un Imperatore,' was common, says the Marquis, in some country districts of Italy even within this century, when peasants were known to have stated as a plea for resisting the military conscription of Napoleon I. that he was not the 'true' Emperor. To mock or modern Emperors small respect is paid.

The Marquis Capponi holds the original government of Florence, by consuls, to have been derived from Roman custom; not, as some historians assert, from the institution of such officers by the German Emperors. His dictum on this subject is an example of the occasional colloquial energy of his style. 'I am aware,' he says, that the legendary connexion with 'Rome was a piece of civic brag; but here we have a positive 'fact; the consuls reappear ever and anon among the southern 'cities of Italy without long intermission from the Roman 'times to the resurgence of the Communes. That they were 'an institution of German origin, let those believe who will.' In fact the antagonism to feudal claims and a Teutonic aristocracy, which was the key-note of early Florentine history, was as much one of race and temperament as of reason. The people of Tuscany were of purer Latin descent than other Italians, if we except the people of Venice. Figlia di Roma was the title by which the citizens on the banks of the Arno loved to express their belief that their city was a direct colony from the Imperial mistress of the world: and to be a daughter of Rome was in no case to be an obedient pupil of barbarian schooling in those ideas of feudal law and aristocratic domination which were gaining their hold over the rest of Europe.

When the denizens of the city proceeded to further organisation it was with the definite object of keeping the outside nobles at bay, and conducting their own affairs after their own fashion. Hence the magistracies of the Anziani, the Buonuomini, the men of character and consideration, who looked after the public interests; while, subsequently to the settlement with Frederick Barbarossa, the Potestà, an officer of non-Florentine extraction, but practically selected by the people, to administer criminal justice, represented, with little real influence in the body politic, the theoretical rights of Imperialism.

Busy and practical was the character of the Florentine burgher from the earliest times. He devoted himself to de

veloping the resources which Nature had munificently placed at his command. What the sheep and silk-worm yielded he manufactured into cloths and draperies. For articles of foreign produce he devised ingenious methods of refinement and colouring. In all European markets he found vent for his wares. He made an art of the circulation of money itself. The Florentine bankers and money-changers rose to an importance not to be gauged by the surface details of history. What helped to incite in the Florentine the love of gain and the taste for commercial enterprise, was the rare combination, with this taste for the practical, of a most delicate and refined appreciation of beauty in the various departments of art. Loving his city, he loved to adorn it. Dante might inveigh against the degenerate luxury of his times, but we have a shrewd suspicion that it was to the scenic beauty of his Fioretta that he partly paid homage when he contemplated her in exile from the Umbrian heights.

With this pride in the beauty of his city was allied the sense of proprietorship in its political management. Busy and practical, and by no means reverential or submissive in the habits of his mind, the Florentine burgher loved to conduct his own affairs for himself. Imaginative, though not reverential, he early conceived an idea of his community as a political existence, a state destined to its own history and position in the world's economy. We have this idea propounded in the prelude to the great work of Villani, by far the most remarkable historical monument of the Middle Ages.

And with the Florentine's civic ardour was moreover allied that singular and marked attribute, his fickleness. For as he identified himself with his city as a political existence, its constitutional perfection became as much the passion of his soul as its artistic beauty. At a period of civilised history when experience was as yet very small in the art of government, and the strivings of new life animated, rapid change seemed the readiest solution for every difficulty as it occurred. Was there a little friction in the machine here or there, no time must be given for the parts to work themselves into harmony by usage, but new screws must be applied, new adjustments made immediately. Any failure in the conduct of state affairs must be at once laid to the charge of ill-working institutions. If a defeat from outside enemies were the untoward incident, then some new dictatorial committee of war or public order must be devised to conduct things better in time to come; if tumults

within the walls, then some novel method of official appointments or organisation of trade militias.

Dante, quel terribile coetaneo,' as the Marquis somewhere calls him, who had the grave reflective tendencies of the northern temperament combined with his southern ardour, criticised. and condemned the mutability of his fellow-citizens. The passage in the Purgatorio' in which he describes it, is familiar to all students of Florentine history, having been cited by perhaps every writer on the theme. He tells the fickle city satirically, that Athens and Sparta, which made the ancient laws and were so renowned for civil arts, were but poor examples of good management compared with her, whose ordinances were so subtly contrived that what was fabricated in October did not last till the middle of November; and reminds her how many times she had changed customs and offices and persons within recent experience, being no less restless than the sick patient tossing on her couch.

Experience, in the long course of history, does much in the way of teaching. It does at last dispel illusions and quench enthusiasms in a large portion of mankind, at all events. The Gambettist republican of to-day reins in his radical zeal in remembrance of the failures of 1793 and 1848, with their overripe theories of the Rights of Man, and of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity.' The Florentine citizen, after many tossings to and fro on the feverish bed of democratic experiment, sank wearied into oligarchic optimism, then pillowed himself on Medicean popular Cæsarism. The last stirrings of his political self-consciousness were evidenced in those tempered theories of the sixteenth century, which philosophical doctrinaires elaborated when it was too late to put them to the test of practice.

For our present purpose we will divide the course of Florentine history into four stages. First, that which the Marquis Capponi himself calls the heroic stage;' secondly, the levelling stage; thirdly, the reactionary or aristocratic stage; fourthly, the Medicean or servile stage. The study throughout these successive periods of the democratic principle on which the constitution was founded, is one of great interest and instruction at the present day; and it has this advantage over the study of the same principle on a larger scale--as in the United States, for instance that here we have the beginning, the middle, and the end before us, and can trace effects and causes within definite limits. In short, here we have a compact miniature picture before our eyes; and moreover a picture whose

intellectual and artistic setting makes it attractive on other grounds than those of political instruction.

The Marquis Capponi calls that the heroic' age during which the Guelph and Ghibelline contest was a real and inspiring cause of action. The poet of the Divina Com'media, indeed, looks back to a time from which the heroic age itself is a degeneracy, when through the mouth of his ancestor Cacciaguida, he asserts the first corruption of the city to have come with the extension of its walls in 1078. From that time it was, he laments, that the leathern jerkin with buttons of bone ceased to be the habiliment of important citizens, that ladies painted their faces and adorned themselves with showy apparel, that the portentous marriage portions required for their daughters made parents tremble! Trade, no doubt, was already introducing comparative luxury; but it must be said, in spite of Dante, that the personal habits of the Florentine burgher continued to be thrifty to the latest period of the Republic. His expenditure was more upon public works than upon personal display.

Taking then the war preceding the Peace of Constance (1183) as the starting-point for the heroic' era, and the date of Dante's death, 1321, as its termination-that being about the time when the last political contest of the Republic against the Empire ceased, we may assign, as the leading characteristic of this century and a half, the great collision between those principles of feudalism and democratic independence to which accidental circumstance affixed the nicknames of Guelph and Ghibelle. Now here we must carefully remark, that the republican life of Florence turned upon two main pivots. Its original idea was that of championing civic self-government against feudal tyranny. Its secondary idea, which evolved itself out of the actual condition of civic life within its walls, and became paramount as the other became effete, was the supremacy and advance of the industrial arts. The first was political, the second social. Both combined in fostering democracy; and therefore, as long as Guelphism was a real cause, there was no want of harmony in the adjustment of the political machine. When Guelphism became a name to cover other party views, it was otherwise. The two co-operating pivots on which the machinery had hitherto turned came to act in different directions; and in the discordant relations between the governing body, or Signoria, by which the State was worked, and that curious institution within the State-the Magistrato 'di Parte Guelfa'-we shall find the key to all the political vicissitudes of the Republic from the time when the heroic age