Florence, all as great as Strozzi, and as able as their adversaries
the Medici, though vanquished by the superior craft and wiliness of
the latter. What could be more worthy of admiration than the conduct
of the chief of the Pazzi at the time of the conspiracy of his house,
when, his commerce being at that time enormous, he settled all his
accounts with Asia, the Levant, and Europe before beginning that great
attempt; so that, if it failed, his correspondents should lose
nothing.

The history of the establishment of the house of the Medici in the
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries is a magnificent tale which still
remains to be written, though men of genius have already put their
hands to it. It is not the history of a republic, nor of a society,
nor of any special civilization; it is the history of /statesmen/,
the eternal history of Politics,--that of usurpers, that of conquerors.

As soon as Filippo Strozzi returned to Florence he re-established the
preceding form of government and ousted Ippolito de' Medici, another
bastard, and the very Alessandro with whom, at the later period of
which we are now writing, he was travelling to Livorno. Having
completed this change of government, he became alarmed at the evident
inconstancy of the people of Florence, and, fearing the vengeance of
Clement VII., he went to Lyon to superintend a vast house of business
he owned there, which corresponded with other banking-houses of his
own in Venice, Rome, France, and Spain. Here we find a strange thing.
These men who bore the weight of public affairs and of such a struggle
as that with the Medici (not to speak of contentions with their own
party) found time and strength to bear the burden of a vast business
and all its speculations, also of banks and their complications, which
the multiplicity of coinages and their falsification rendered even