that nothing but shame and loss would be our
lot; recent experience may serve to foretell the future." How true a
prophet he was, the subsequent course of Italian history revealed!

Anxious though the situation was, crucial though many of the problems
he had to solve undoubtedly were, yet the statement may be accepted as
approximately true that the last three or four years of Lorenzo's
life were spent amid profound peace--at least as far as Florence was
concerned. Roscoe's picture is highly colored, but not overcolored:

"At this period the city of Florence was at its highest degree
of prosperity. The vigilance of Lorenzo had secured it from all
apprehensions of external attack; and his acknowledged disinterestedness
and moderation had almost extinguished that spirit of dissension for
which it had been so long remarkable. The Florentines gloried in their
illustrious citizen, and were gratified by numbering in their body a man
who wielded in his hand the fate of nations and attracted the respect
and admiration of all Europe; the administration of justice engaged his
constant attention, and he carefully avoided giving rise to an idea that
he was himself above the control of the law."

And Guicciardini adds: "This season of tranquillity was prosperous beyond
any that Italy had experienced during the long course of a thousand
years. Abounding in men eminent in the administration of public affairs,
skilled in every honorable science and every useful art, it stood high in
the estimation of foreign nations; which extraordinary felicity, acquired
at many different opportunities, several circumstances contributed to
preserve, but among the rest no small share of it was by general consent
ascribed to the industry and the virtue of Lorenzo de' Medici, a citizen
who rose so far above the mediocrity of a private station that he
regulated by his counsels the affairs of Florence, then more important by
its situation, by the genius of its inhabitants, and the promptitude
of its resources than by the extent of its dominions, and who, having
obtained the implicit confidence of the Roman pontiff Innocent VIII,
rendered his name great and his authority important in the affairs of
Italy."

Though he had never allowed the demands of civic affairs to interfere
with his interest in the progress of the Renaissance, war-time, as we
have said, is not favorable to the cultivation of letters. While
the connection between the states during the c