ber, and even dimly hints that some day he may
appear in silken jerkin and tight hose, like a well-to-do burgess. No
greater contrast perhaps, unless indeed we should compare his
sweetheart, Lorenzo's beautiful Nenciozza, with her box full of jewels,
her Sunday garb of damask kirtle and gold-worked bodice, her almost
queenly ways towards her adorers, with the wretched creature, not a
woman, but a mere female animal, cowering among her starving children in
her mud cottage, and looking forward, in dull lethargy, after the
morning full of outrages at the castle, to the night, the night on the
heath, lit with mysterious flickers, to the horrible joys of the
sacrifice which the oppressed brings to the dethroned, the serf to
Satan; when, in short, we compare the peasant woman described by Lorenzo
with the female serf resuscitated by the genius of Michelet; nay, more
poignant still, with that mother in the "Dance of Death," seated on the
mud flood of the broken-roofed, dismantled hovel, stewing something on a
fire of twigs, and stretching out vain arms to her poor tattered
baby-boy, whom, with the good-humoured tripping step of an old nurse,
the kindly skeleton is leading away out of this cruel world.

Such were the conditions of the peasantry of the great Italian
commonwealths. They were, as much as the northern serfs were the
reverse, creatures pleasant to deal with, pleasant to watch.

The upper classes, on the other hand, differed quite as much from the
upper classes of feudal countries. They were, be it remembered, men of
business, constantly in contact with the working classes; Albizis,
Strozzis, Pandolfinis, Guinigis, Tolomeis, no matter what their name,
these men who built palaces and churches which outdid the magnificence
of northern princes, and who might, at any moment, be sent ambassadors
from Florence, Lucca, or Siena, to the French or English kings, to the
Emperor or the Pope, spent a large portion of their days at their office
desk, among the bales of their warehouses, behind the counter of their
shops; they wore the same dress, had the same habits, spoke the same
dialect, as the weavers and dyers, the carriers and porters whom they
employed, and whose sons might, by talent and industry, amass a fortune,
build palaces, and go ambassadors to kings in their turn. When,
therefore, these merchant nobles turned to the country for rest and
relief from their cares, it was not to the country as it existed for the
feuda