get only the main localities of the contest well into your minds. It
was all concentrated in the furious hostility of Genoa and Pisa; Genoa
fighting really very piously for the Pope, as well as for herself; Pisa
for her own hand, and for the Emperor as much as suited her. The mad
little sea falcon never caught sight of another water-bird on the wing,
but she must hawk at it; and as an ally of the Emperor, balanced Venice
and Genoa with her single strength. And so it came to pass that the
victory of either the Guelph or Ghibelline party depended on the final
action of Florence.

97. Florence meanwhile was fighting with herself, for her own
amusement. She was nominally at the head of the Guelphic League in
Tuscany; but this only meant that she hated Siena and Pisa, her
southern and western neighbours. She had never declared openly against
the Emperor. On the contrary, she always recognized his authority, in
an imaginative manner, as representing that of the Caesars. She spent
her own energy chiefly in street-fighting,--the death of Buondelmonti
in 1215 having been the root of a series of quarrels among her nobles
which gradually took the form of contests of honour; and were a kind of
accidental tournaments, fought to the death, because they could not be
exciting or dignified enough on any other condition. And thus the
manner of life came to be customary, which you have accurately, with
its consequences, pictured by Shakspeare. Samson bites his thumb at
Abraham, and presently the streets are impassable in battle. The
quarrel in the Canongate between the Leslies and Seytons, in Scott's
'Abbot,' represents the same temper; and marks also, what Shakspeare
did not so distinctly, because it would have interfered with the
domestic character of his play, the connection of these private
quarrels with political divisions which paralyzed the entire body of
the State.--Yet these political schisms, in the earlier days of Italy,