the refined manners, the Scotch words and idioms, the descriptive
power, the picturesque and dramatic fancy, the neat, colloquial
turns in dialogue, the quaint similes, the sprinkle of metaphors,
the love of dogs, the eloquent touches with regard to the pure
and tender relations of father and daughter; and clinched the
investigation by showing the freedom and correctness in the use
of law-terms and phrases, which indicated clearly that the author
was a lawyer. It being easy when a way has been shown to follow
in the track, I turned to the period in question, which, I knew,
must be the first half of the fifteenth century, to look for a writer,
whose qualities, literary and moral,--or rather immoral,--could win
for him the triumphal car of being the Author of the Annals--if
triumph can, in any way, be associated with such ingloriousness
as forgery,--and, after a little looking about, I found him in
one whose compositions display, not to a remote, but in a close
degree the energy, the animation, the feeling, the genius, the
true taste, the deep meaning, and glimpses, ever and anon, of that
signal power, which, rising into truly awful magnificence, of
looking deeply into the darkest recesses of the human heart,
runs through the Annals like the shining waters of a river in
whose rich sands roll grains of gold.

The age of that writer was instinct with mental power: men were
giants of intellect: Italy had soared to the highest pinnacle in
the domain of mind, unequalled by preceding ages, except those of
Pericles and Augustus: beginning in the fourteenth Century with
Dante and Petrarch, and ending at the beginning of the sixteenth
with the father of the modern political system, Machiavelli, it
rose to the highest point of its altitude, and remained there
through the whole of the fifteenth, when such bright lights shone