of the masked Medicean despotism had destroyed the reality of freedom in
Florence, and had corrupted her citizens to the core. Yet, strange to
say, it was at the end of the fifteenth century that the genius of the
thirteenth revived. Italian literature was cultivated for its own sake
under the auspices of Lorenzo de' Medici. The year 1494 marks the
resurrection of the spirit of old liberty beneath the trumpet-blast of
Savonarola's oratory. Amid the universal corruption of public morals,
from the depth of sloth and servitude, when the reality of liberty was
lost, when fate and fortune had combined to render constitutional
reconstruction impossible for the shattered republics of Italy, the
intellect of the Florentines displayed itself with more than its old
vigor in a series of the most brilliant political writers who have ever
illustrated one short but eventful period in the life of a single
nation. That period is marked by the years 1494 and 1537. It embraces
the two final efforts of the Florentines to shake off the Medicean yoke,
the disastrous siege at the end of which they fell a prey to the
selfishness of their own party-leaders, the persecution of Savonarola by
Pope Alexander, the Church-rule of Popes Leo and Clement, the extinction
of the elder branch of the Medici in its two bastards (Ippolito,
poisoned by his brother Alessandro, and Alessandro poignarded by his
cousin Lorenzino), and the final eclipse of liberty beneath the
Spain-appointed dynasty of the younger Medicean line in Duke Cosimo. The
names of the historians of this period are Niccolo Machiavelli, Jacopo
Nardi, Francesco Guicciardini, Filippo Nerli, Donato Giannotti,
Benedetto Varchi, Bernardo Segni, and Jacopo Pitti.[1] In these men the
mental qualities which we admire in the Villani, Dante, and Compagni
reappear, combined, indeed, in different proportions, tempered with the
new philosophy and scholarship of the Renaissance, and permeated with
quite another morality. In the interval of two centuries freedom has
been lost. It is only the desire for freedom that survives. But that,