vestigations upon a diligent
study of public records, state-papers, and notes of contemporary
observers.[3] The same men prepared themselves for the task of criticism
by a profound study of ethical and political philosophy in the works of
Aristotle, Plato, Cicero, and Tacitus.[4] They examined the methods of
classical historians, and compared the annals of Greece, Rome, and
Palestine with the chronicles of their own country. They attempted to
divine the genius and to characterize the special qualities of the
nations, cities, and individuals of whom they had to treat.[5] At the
same time they spared no pains in seeking out persons possessed of
accurate knowledge in every branch of inquiry that came beneath their
notice, so that their treatises have the freshness of original documents
and the charm of personal memoirs. Much, as I have elsewhere noted, was
due to the peculiarly restless temper of the Florentines, speculative,
variable, unquiet in their politics. The very qualities which exposed
the commonwealth to revolutions, developed the intelligence of her
historians; her want of stability was the price she paid for
intellectual versatility and acuteness unrivaled in modern times. '"_O
ingenia magis acria quam matura_," said Petrarch, and with truth, about
the wits of the Florentines; for it is their property by nature to have
more of liveliness and acumen than of maturity or gravity.'[6]

[1] Since the Greeks, no people have combined curiosity and the love
of beauty, the scientific and the artistic sense, in the same
proportions as the Florentines.

[2] See Machiavelli's critique of Lionardo d'Arezzo and Messer
Poggio, in the Proemio to his _Florentine History_. His own
conception of history, as the attempt to delineate the very spirit
of a nation, is highly philosophical.

[3] The high sense of the requirements of scientific history
attained by the Italians is shown by what Giovio relates of Gian
Galeazzo's archives (_Vita di Gio. Galeazzo_, p. 107). After
describing these, he adds: 'talche, chi volesse scrivere un'
historia giusta non potrebbe desiderare altronde ne piu abbondante
ne piu certa materia; perciocche da questi libri facilissimamente si
traggono le cagioni delle guerre, i consigli, e i successi dell'
imprese.' The Proemio to Varchi's _Storie Fiorentine_ (vol. i. pp.
42-44), which gives an account of his preparatory labors, is an
uncon