The rule of
the nobility, the tyrannies, the struggles of the middle class with the
proletariat, limited and unlimited democracy, pseudo-democracy, the
primacy o? a single house, the theocracy of Savonarola, and the mixed
forms of government which prepared the way for the Medicean despotism
all are so described that the inmost motives of the actors are laid
bare to the light. At length Machiavelli in his Florentine history
(down to 1492) represents his native city as a living organism and its
development as a natural and individual process; he is the first of the
moderns who has risen to such a conception. It lies without our
province to determine whether and in what points Machiavelli may have
done violence to history, as is notoriously the case in his life of
Castruccio Castracani--a fancy picture of the typical despot. We might
find something to say against every line of the 'Storie Fiorentine,'
and yet the great and unique value of the whole would remain
unaffected. And his contemporaries and successors, Jacopo Pitti,
Guicciardini, Segni, Varchi, Vettori, what a circle of illustrious
names! And what a story it is which these masters tell us! The great
and memorable drama of the last decades of the Florentine republic is
here unfolded. The voluminous record of the collapse of the highest and
most original life which the world could then show may appear to one
but as a collection of curiosities, may awaken in another a devilish
delight at the shipwreck of so much nobility and grandeur, to a third
may seem like a great historical assize; for all it will be an object
of thought and study to the end of time.
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