lave Florence. This great man even refused the offer of a
principality made to him by Leo X.

At the time of which we are now writing Filippo Strozzi was a victim
to the policy of the Medici, so vacillating in its means, so fixed
and inflexible in its object. After sharing the misfortunes and the
captivity of Clement VII. when the latter, surprised by the Colonna,
took refuge in the Castle of Saint-Angelo, Strozzi was delivered up by
Clement as a hostage and taken to Naples. As the Pope, when he got his
liberty, turned savagely on his enemies, Strozzi came very near losing
his life, and was forced to pay an enormous sum to be released from a
prison where he was closely confined. When he found himself at liberty
he had, with an instinct of kindness natural to an honest man, the
simplicity to present himself before Clement VII., who had perhaps
congratulated himself on being well rid of him. The Pope had such good
cause to blush for his own conduct that he received Strozzi extremely
ill.

Strozzi thus began, early in life, his apprenticeship in the misfortunes
of an honest man in politics,--a man whose conscience cannot lend itself
to the capriciousness of events; whose actions are acceptable only to
the virtuous; and who is therefore persecuted by the world,--by the
people, for opposing their blind passions; by power for opposing its
usurpations. The life of such great citizens is a martyrdom, in which
they are sustained only by the voice of their conscience and an heroic
sense of social duty, which dictates their course in all things. There
were many such men in the republic of 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