It would no doubt have preserved its splendid suburbs and gardens, and
the lives and prosperity of countless citizens; but it would have been
the poorer by one of its greatest and most ennobling memories.
In many of their chief merits the Florentines are the pattern and the
earliest type of Italians and modern Europeans generally; they are so
also in many of their defects. When Dante compares the city which was
always mending its constitution with the sick man who is continually
changing his posture to escape from pain, he touches with the
comparison a permanent feature of the political life of Florence. The
great modern fallacy that a constitution can be made, can be
manufactured by a combination of existing forces and tendencies, was
constantly cropping up in stormy times; even Machiavelli is not wholly
free from it. Constitutional artists were never wanting who by an
ingenious distribution and division of political power, by indirect
elections of the most complicated kind, by the establishment of nominal
offices, sought to found a lasting order of things, and to satisfy or
to deceive the rich and the poor alike. They naively fetch their
examples from classical antiquity, and borrow the party names
'ottimati,' 'aristocrazia,' as a matter of course. The world since then
has become used to these expressions and given them a conventional
European sense, whereas all former party names were purely national,
and oithor rhnrnotPrimPrl tho rnilqP nt iqqllP or cnrsnz from the
caprice of accident.
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