The members of the defeated parties, on the other hand, often came into
a position like that of the subjects of the despotic States, with the
difference that the freedom or power already enjoyed, and in some cases
the hope of recovering them, gave a higher energy to their
individuality. Among these men of involuntary leisure we find, for
instance, an Agnolo Pandolfini (d. 1446), whose work on domestic
economy is the first complete programme of a developed private life.
His estimate of the duties of the individual as against the dangers and
thanklessness of public life is in its way a true monument of the age.
Banishment, too, has this effect above all, that it either wears the
exile out or develops whatever is greatest in him. 'In all our more
populous cities,' says Gioviano Pontano, 'we see a crowd of people who
have left their homes of their own free will; but a man takes his
virtues with him wherever he goes.' And, in fact, they were by no means
only men who had been actually exiled, but thousands left their native
place voluntarily, be cause they found its political or economic
condition intolerable. The Florentine emigrants at Ferrara and the
Lucchese in Venice formed whole colonies by themselves.
The cosmopolitanism which grew up in the most gifted circles is in
itself a high stage of individualism.
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