als,
from the depth of sloth and servitude, when the reality of liberty was
lost, when fate and fortune had combined to render constitutional
reconstruction impossible for the shattered republics of Italy, the
intellect of the Florentines displayed itself with more than its old
vigor in a series of the most brilliant political writers who have ever
illustrated one short but eventful period in the life of a single
nation. That period is marked by the years 1494 and 1537. It embraces
the two final efforts of the Florentines to shake off the Medicean yoke,
the disastrous siege at the end of which they fell a prey to the
selfishness of their own party-leaders, the persecution of Savonarola by
Pope Alexander, the Church-rule of Popes Leo and Clement, the extinction
of the elder branch of the Medici in its two bastards (Ippolito,
poisoned by his brother Alessandro, and Alessandro poignarded by his
cousin Lorenzino), and the final eclipse of liberty beneath the
Spain-appointed dynasty of the younger Medicean line in Duke Cosimo. The
names of the historians of this period are Niccolo Machiavelli, Jacopo
Nardi, Francesco Guicciardini, Filippo Nerli, Donato Giannotti,
Benedetto Varchi, Bernardo Segni, and Jacopo Pitti.[1] In these men the
mental qualities which we admire in the Villani, Dante, and Compagni
reappear, combined, indeed, in different proportions, tempered with the
new philosophy and scholarship of the Renaissance, and permeated with
quite another morality. In the interval of two centuries freedom has
been lost. It is only the desire for freedom that survives. But that,
after the apathy of the fifteenth century, is still a passion. The
rectitude of instinct and the intense convictions of the earlier age
have been exchanged for a scientific clairvoyance, a 'stoic-epicurean
acceptance' of the facts of vitiated civilization, which in men like
Guicciardini and Machiavelli is absolutely appalling. Nearly all the
authors of this period bear a double face. They write one set of memoirs
for the public, and another set for their own delectation. In their
inmost souls they burn with the zeal for liberty: yet they sell their
abilities to the highest bidder--to Popes whom they despise, and to
Dukes whom they revile in private. What makes the literary labors of
these historians doubly interesting is that they were carried on for the
most part independently; for though they lived at the same time, and in
some cases held familiar con