Wealth and culture, so far as display
and rivalry were not forbidden to them, a municipal freedom which did
not cease to be considerable, and a Church which, unlike that of the
Byzantine or of the Mohammedan world, was not identical with the State-
-all these conditions undoubtedly favored the growth of individual
thought, for which the necessary leisure was furnished by the cessation
of party conflicts. The private man, indifferent to politics, and
busied partly with serious pursuits, partly with the interests of a
_dilettante, _seems to have been first fully formed in these despotisms
of the fourteenth century. Documentary evidence cannot, of course, be
required on such a point. The novelists, from whom we might expect
information, describe to us oddities in plenty, but only from one point
of view and in so far as the needs of the story demand. Their scene,
too, lies chiefly in the republican cities.
In the latter, circumstances were also, but in another way, favourable
to the growth of individual character. The more frequently the
governing party was changed, the more the individual was led to make
the utmost of the exercise and enjoyment of power. The statesmen and
popular leaders, especially in Florentine history, acquired so marked a
personal character that we can scarcely find, even exceptionally, a
parallel to them in contemporary history, hardly even in Jacob van
Arteveldt.
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