tree, resolving, if it fell, to join, as a common soldier, the roving
band which had just invited him; if it adhered to the wood, to remain
at home a laboring hind--becomes Duke of Milan, and is encouraged in
his usurpation by Cosmo Vecchio, who still gives himself the airs of
first-citizen of Florence.

The serpent, the well-known cognizance of the Visconti, had already
coiled itself around all those fair and clustering cities which were
once the Lombard republics, and had poisoned their vigorous life. The
Ezzelinos, Carraras, Gonzagas, Scalas, had crushed the spirit of
liberty in the neighborhood of Venice. All this had been accomplished
by means of mercenary adventurers, guided only by the love of plunder;
while those two luxurious and stately republics--the one an oligarchy,
the other a democracy--looked on from their marble palaces, enjoying
the refreshing bloodshowers in which their own golden harvests were so
rapidly ripening.

Meanwhile a gigantic despotism was maturing, which was eventually to
crush the power, glory, wealth, and freedom of Italy.

This _palazzo_ of Cosmo the Elder is a good type of Florentine
architecture at its ultimate epoch, just as Cosmo himself was the
largest expression of the Florentine citizen in the last and over-ripe
stage.

The Medici family, unheard of in the thirteenth century, obscure and
plebeian in the middle of the fourteenth, and wealthy bankers and
leaders of the democratic party at its close, culminated in the early
part of the fifteenth in the person of Cosmo. The _Pater
Patriae,_--so called, because, having at last absorbed all the