the wild beast he had roused had
him by the throat, and burnt him in the fire he had invoked. His
political ideas were beneath contempt; they were insincere, as he
proved, and they were merely an excuse for riot. He bade, or is said to
have bidden, Lorenzo restore her liberty to Florence. When, then, had
Florence possessed this liberty, of which all these English writers who
sentimentalise over this unique and unfortunate Ferrarese traitor speak
with so much feeling and awe? Florence had never possessed political
liberty of any sort whatever; she was ruled by the great families, by
the guilds, by an oligarchy, by a despot. She was never free till she
lost herself in Italy in 1860. Socially she was freer under the Medici
than she was before or has been since.[110] In the production of unique
personalities a sort of social freedom is necessary, and Florence under
the earlier Medici might seem to have produced more of such men than any
other city or state in the history of the world, saving Athens in the
time of the despot Pericles. The happiest period in the history of
Athens was that in which he was master, even as the greatest and most
fortunate years in the history of the Florentine state were those in
which Cosimo, Piero, and Lorenzo ruled in Florence. And when at last
Lorenzo died, the Pope saw very clearly that on that day had passed away
"the peace of Italy." It is to the grave of this great and unique man
you come when leaving the cloisters of S. Lorenzo, and passing round the
church into Piazza Madonna, you enter the Cappella Medicea, and,
ascending the stairs on the left, find again on the left the new
sacristy, built in 1519 by Michelangelo. Lorenzo lies with his murdered
brother Giuliano, who fell under the daggers of the Pazzi on that Easter
morning in the Duomo, between the two splendid and terrible tombs of his
successors, under an unfinished monument facing the altar; a beautiful
Madonna and Child, an unfinished work by Michelangelo, and the two
Medici Saints, S. Damian by Raffaello da Montelupo, and S. Cosmas by
Montorsoli. It is not, however, this humble and almost nameless grave
that draws us to-day to the Sagrestia Nuova, but the monument carved by
Michelangelo for two lesser and later Medici: Giuliano, Duc de Nemours,
who died in 1516, and Lorenzo, Duc d'Urbino, who died in 1519. When
Lorenzo il Magnifico died at Careggi in April 1492, he left seven
children: Giovanni, who became Leo X; Piero, who succ