om the council-chamber a written guarantee of
his immunity and of his retention of office.

Among the twenty Florentines who bent their grave eyes on Tito, as he
stood gracefully before them, speaking of startling things with easy
periphrasis, and with that apparently unaffected admission of being
actuated by motives short of the highest, which is often the intensest
affectation, there were several whose minds were not too entirely
preoccupied to pass a new judgment on him in these new circumstances;
they silently concluded that this ingenious and serviceable Greek was in
future rather to be used for public needs than for private intimacy.
Unprincipled men were useful, enabling those who had more scruples to
keep their hands tolerably clean in a world where there was much dirty
work to be done. Indeed, it was not clear to respectable Florentine
brains, unless they held the Frate's extravagant belief in a possible
purity and loftiness to be striven for on this earth, how life was to be
carried on in any department without human instruments whom it would not
be unbecoming to kick or to spit upon in the act of handing them their
wages. Some of these very men who passed a tacit judgment on Tito were
shortly to be engaged in a memorable transaction that could by no means
have been carried through without the use of an unscrupulousness as
decided as his; but, as their own bright poet Pulci had said for them,
it is one thing to love the fruits of treachery, and another thing to
love traitors--

"Il tradimento a molti piace assai,
Ma il traditore a gnun non piacque mal."

The same society has had a gibbet for the murderer and a gibbet for the
martyr, an execrating hiss for a dastardly act, and as loud a hiss for
many a word of generous truthfulness or just insight: a mixed condition
of things which is the sign, not of hopeless confusion, but of
struggling order.

For Tito himself, he was not unaware that he had sunk a little in the
estimate, of the men who had accepted his services. He had that degree
of self-contemplation which necessarily accompanies the habit of acting
on well-considered reasons, of whatever quality; and if he could have
chosen, he would have declined to see himself disapproved by men of the
world. He had never meant to be disapproved; he had meant always to
conduct himself so ably that if he acted in opposition to the standard
of other men they should not be aware of it; and the barrier between