d as their
tutelar deity under such astral influences that if he were broken, or
otherwise treated with indignity, the city would suffer great damage and
mutation. But in the fifteenth century that discreet regard to the
feelings of the Man-destroyer had long vanished: the god of the spear
and shield had ceased to frown by the side of the Arno, and the defences
of the Republic were held to lie in its craft and its coffers. For
spear and shield could be hired by gold florins, and on the gold florins
there had always been the image of San Giovanni.

Much good had come to Florence since the dim time of struggle between
the old patron and the new: some quarrelling and bloodshed, doubtless,
between Guelf and Ghibelline, between Black and White, between orthodox
sons of the Church and heretic Paterini; some floods, famine, and
pestilence; but still much wealth and glory. Florence had achieved
conquests over walled cities once mightier than itself, and especially
over hated Pisa, whose marble buildings were too high and beautiful,
whose masts were too much honoured on Greek and Italian coasts. The
name of Florence had been growing prouder and prouder in all the courts
of Europe, nay, in Africa itself, on the strength of purest gold
coinage, finest dyes and textures, pre-eminent scholarship and poetic
genius, and wits of the most serviceable sort for statesmanship and
banking: it was a name so omnipresent that a Pope with a turn for
epigram had called Florentines "the fifth element." And for this high
destiny, though it might partly depend on the stars and Madonna dell'
Impruneta, and certainly depended on other higher Powers less often
named, the praise was greatly due to San Giovanni, whose image was on
the fair gold florins.

Therefore it was fitting that the day of San Giovanni--that ancient
Church festival already venerable in the days of Saint Augustine--should
be a day of peculiar rejoicing to Florence, and should be ushered in by
a vigil duly kept in strict old Florentine fashion, with much dancing,
with much street jesting, and perhaps with not a little stone-throwing
and window-breaking, but emphatically with certain street sights such as
could only be provided by a city which held in its service a clever
Cecca, engineer and architect, valuable alike in sieges and in shows.
By the help of Cecca, the very saints, surrounded with their
almond-shaped glory, and floating on clouds with their joyous
companionship of