the war department, of the "Eight" who attended to
home discipline, of the Priori or Signori who were the heads of the
executive government; he had even risen to the supreme office of
Gonfaloniere; he had made one in embassies to the Pope and to the
Venetians; and he had been commissary to the hired army of the Republic,
directing the inglorious bloodless battles in which no man died of brave
breast wounds--_virtuosi colpi_--but only of casual falls and
tramplings. And in this way he had learned to distrust men without
bitterness; looking on life mainly as a game of skill, but not dead to
traditions of heroism and clean-handed honour. For the human soul is
hospitable, and will entertain conflicting sentiments and contradictory
opinions with much impartiality. It was his pride besides, that he was
duly tinctured with the learning of his age, and judged not altogether
with the vulgar, but in harmony with the ancients: he, too, in his
prime, had been eager for the most correct manuscripts, and had paid
many florins for antique vases and for disinterred busts of the ancient
immortals--some, perhaps, _truncis naribus_, wanting as to the nose, but
not the less authentic; and in his old age he had made haste to look at
the first sheets of that fine Homer which was among the early glories of
the Florentine press. But he had not, for all that, neglected to hang
up a waxen image or double of himself under the protection of the
Madonna Annunziata, or to do penance for his sins in large gifts to the
shrines of saints whose lives had not been modelled on the study of the
classics; he had not even neglected making liberal bequests towards
buildings for the Frati, against whom he had levelled many a jest.

For the Unseen Powers were mighty. Who knew--who was sure--that there
was _any_ name given to them behind which there was no angry force to be
appeased, no intercessory pity to be won? Were not gems medicinal,
though they only pressed the finger? Were not all things charged with
occult virtues? Lucretius might be right--he was an ancient, and a
great poet; Luigi Pulci, too, who was suspected of not believing
anything from the roof upward (_dal tetto in su_), had very much the air
of being right over the supper-table, when the wine and jests were
circulating fast, though he was only a poet in the vulgar tongue. There
were even learned personages who maintained that Aristotle, wisest of
men (unless, indeed, Plato were wiser?)