executed and expressed. I think much time and much learning have been
spent on a discussion both fruitless and unnecessary. We cannot err if
we subject the question to a consideration at once critical and
impartial.

The widely differing opinions eagerly supported by different writers
on this point, form a very good example of the deceiving influence of
national feeling on the judgment in matters of historical criticism.
For, on the one hand, we find many German writers ignoring entirely
the old framework of Roman organization, and recognizing only the new
Teutonic life which gave back to it the strength it had lost; on the
other, a host of lesser Italian writers who magnify certain old names
and forms, and mistake them for the substance, making all the new life
of Italy but the return of a past, which belonged to a greatness that
was dead. Many there are of this school in Italy, where you will often
find to-day a commune of three hundred inhabitants, with its one or
two constables wearing the imperial badge, "_Senatus Populusque
Albanensis_" or "_Verulensis_," as the case may be. Truly a suggestive
anachronism! It is true that in remote ages especially, when the
records of history are few and uncertain--and the period we are
considering in this paper can almost be called the prehistoric age of
municipal institutions in Northern Italy--much can be learned and much
truth inferred from the evidence of a name. But this is a species of
evidence we can never be too cautious in using, as the temptation is
always to infer too much rather than too little.

In the following pages I will try to sift the evidence obtainable,
with the impartiality of one trammeled by the support of no particular
theory; always bearing in mind, however, one fact, all-important in a
study where so much depends on nomenclature, namely, to give that