been unhesitatingly showered upon it.[1]

[1] It is to be hoped that the completion of Del Lungo's work may
put an end to the Compagni controversy, either by a solid
vindication of the 'Chronicle,' or by so weak a defense as to render
further partisanship impossible. So far as his book has hitherto
appeared, it contains no signs of an ultimate triumph. The
weightiest point contained in it is the discovery of the Ashburnham
MS. If Del Lungo fails to prove his position, we shall be left to
choose between Scheffer-Boichorst's absolute skepticism or the
modified view adopted by me in the text.

The two chief Florentine historians of the fifteenth century are
Lionardo Bruni of Arezzo, and Poggio Bracciolini, each of whom, in his
capacity of Chancellor to the Republic, undertook to write the annals of
the people of Florence from the earliest date to his own time. Lionardo
Aretino wrote down to the year 1404, and Poggio Bracciolini to the year
1455. Their histories are composed in Latin, and savor much of the
pedantic spirit of the age in which they were projected.[1] Both of them
deserve the criticism of Machiavelli, that they filled their pages too
exclusively with the wars and foreign affairs in which Florence was
engaged, failing to perceive that the true object of the historian is to
set forth the life of a commonwealth as a continuous whole, to draw the
portrait of a state with due regard to its especial physiognomy.[2] To
this critique we may add that both Lionardo and Poggio were led astray
by the false taste of the earlier Renaissance. Their admiration for Livy
and the pedantic proprieties of a labored Latinism made them pay more
attention to rhetoric than to the substance of their work.[3] We meet
with frigid imitations and bombastic generalities, where concise
details and graphic touches would have been acceptable. In short, these