It has been rightly decided to publish selections of
these works, although no little study will be needed to extract clear
and definite results from them. At all events, we have no difficulty in
recognizing the city, where dying parents begged the government in
their wills to fine their sons 1,000 florins if they declined to
practice a regular profession.
For the first half of the sixteenth century probably no State in the
world possesses a document like the magnificent description of Florence
by Varchi. In descriptive statistics, as in so many things besides, yet
another model is left to us, before the freedom a nd greatness of the
city sank into the grave.
This statistical estimate of outward life is, however, uniformly
accompanied by the narrative of political events to which we have
already referred. Florence not only existed under political forms more
varied than those of the free States of Italy and of Europe generally,
but it reflected upon them far more deeply. It is a faithful mirror of
the relations of individuals and classes to a variable whole. The
pictures of the great civic democracies in France and in Flanders, as
they are delineated in Froissart, and the narratives of the German
chroniclers of the fourteenth century, are in truth of high importance;
but in comprehensiveness of thought and in the rational development of
the story, none will bear comparison with the Florentines.
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