hat ought not to give every reward to writers who should
commemorate its doings. We see at Florence that from the foundation of
the city to the days of Messer Lionardo and Messer Poggio there was no
record of anything that the Florentines had done, in Latin, or history
devoted to themselves. Messer Poggio follows after Messer Lionardo, and
writes like him in Latin. Giovanni Villani, too, wrote an universal
history in the vulgar tongue of whatsoever happened in every place, and
introduces the affairs of Florence as they happened. The same did Messer
Filippo Villani, following after Giovanni Villani. These are they alone
who have distinguished Florence by the histories that they have
written.'[5] The pride of the citizen and a just sense of the value of
history, together with sound remarks upon Venice and Milan, mingle
curiously in this passage with the pedantry of a fifteenth-century
scholar.

[1] Poggio's _Historia Populi Florentini_ is given in the XXth
volume of Muratori's collection. Lionardo's _Istoria Fiorentina_,
translated into Italian by Donato Acciajuoli, has been published by
Le Monnier (Firenze, 1861). The high praise which Ugo Foscolo
bestowed upon the latter seems due to a want of familiarity.

[2] See the preface to the _History of Florence_, by Machiavelli.

[3] Lionardo Bruni, for example, complains in the preface to his
history that it is impossible to accommodate the rude names of his
personages to a polished style.

[4] Both Poggio and Lionardo began life as Papal secretaries; the
latter was not made a citizen of Florence till late in his career.

[5] _Vite di Uomini Illustri_. Barbera, 1859; p. 425.

The historians of the first half of the sixteenth century are a race
apart. Three generations of pedantic erudition and of courtly or
scholastic trifling had separated the men of letters from the men of
action, and had made literature a thing of curiosity. Three generations
of the masked Medicean despotism had destroyed the reality of freedom in
Florence, and had corrupted her citizens to the core. Yet, strange to
say, it was at the end of the fifteenth century that the genius of the
thirteenth revived. Italian literature was cultivated for its own sake
under the auspices of Lorenzo de' Medici. The year 1494 marks the
resurrection of the spirit of old liberty beneath the trumpet-blast of
Savonarola's oratory. Amid the universal corruption of public mor