ll himself so, would
have been little better than a pariah, one whom all might have kicked
because he had no friends, a mere waif on the turbulent current of the
surging and unruly life of those days, felt in every fibre of his being,
and from his cradle to his grave, that what he _was_ in the world, and
what all that he cared for in the world depended on, was the fact that
he was a constituent part of this, that or the other civic community.
His fellow-citizens were his friends; and it but too naturally followed
that the members of other, and especially of neighboring communities,
were his enemies: even in the best times, and in the case of the best
and largest natures, they were his rivals. The relative superiority of
his own city in arts, in arms and in glory of every kind was the
strongest sentiment and most fondly-cherished belief of all those men on
whom the world now looks back as forming the diadem by virtue of which
Italy claims to have led the van of modern European civilization, but
who in their own estimation belonged wholly and exclusively to their own
city. If Dante, the range of whose intellectual sympathies can hardly be
deemed a narrow one--Dante the exile, whose chequered life made him the
denizen of so many foreign homes--could speak of the degeneration of the
pure Florentine blood by the admixture of that of _foreigners_ whose
native place was some five or ten miles outside the walls of Florence it
may be estimated how smaller minds and narrower natures would feel on
the subject. Each townsman felt that he was the heir to all the glories
achieved or inherited by his community. Each artist, each workman who
attained to praise and excellence in his craft, felt that he was
increasing the store of those glories, and was deserving well of a body
of compatriots who would lovingly appreciate his works and be the
jealous guardian of his fame. Dreadful that men living within walls on
the eastern slope of a valley should be bred to hatred of those
inhabiting other walls on the opposite slope, and be ever ready at a
moment's notice and on the smallest cause to fly at the others' throats!
Contrary to every principle alike of morality, religion, political
economy and social science! All true; and yet how wonderful, how
matchless was the amount of deathless work produced under the conditions
of that order of things!

Doubtless, Signor Francesco Moretti would not feel the smallest desire
to belittle the works of an