has whirled them far from waves that the white gull skims over.
They have their tales of it to tell to their governess, their memories
of it to count over before they fall asleep, their dreams of it as they
lie asleep, their hopes of seeing it again when weary winter and spring
and summer have at last slipped away. They listen to stories of wrecks,
and find a halfpenny for the sham sailor who trolls his ballads in the
street. Now and then they look lovingly at the ships and the
sand-buckets piled away in the play-cupboard. So with one abiding
thought at their little hearts the long days glide away till autumn
finds them again children by the sea.

THE FLORENCE OF DANTE.

The one story in the history of the modern world which rivals in
concentrated interest the story of Athens is the story of Florence in
the years just before and after the opening of the fourteenth
century--the few years, that is, of its highest glory in freedom, in
letters, in art. Never since the days of Pericles had such a varied
outburst of human energy been summed up in so short a space.
Architecture reared the noble monuments of the Duomo and Santa Croce.
Cimabue revolutionized painting, and then "the cry was Giotto's."
Italian poetry, preluded by the canzonets of Guido Cavalcanti and his
rivals, rose to its fullest grandeur in the 'Commedia' of Dante. Italian
prose was born in the works of Malaspina and Dino. Within, the
Florentines worked out patiently and bravely amidst a thousand obstacles
the problem of free and popular government. Without, they covered sea
and land with their commerce; their agents supplied the Papal treasury,
while private firms were already beginning that career of vast foreign
loans which at a later time enabled the victor of Crecy to equip his
armies with Florentine gold.

We can only realize the attitude of Florence at this moment by its
contrast with the rest of Europe. It was a time when Germany was sinking
down into feudal chaos under the earlier Hapsburgs. The system of
despotic centralization invented by St. Louis and perfected by Philippe
le Bel was crushing freedom and vigour out of France. If Parliamentary
life was opening in England, literature was dead, and a feudalism which
had become embittered by the new forms of law which the legal spirit of
the age gave it was pressing harder and harder on the peasantry. Even in
Italy Florence stood alone. The South lay crushed beneath the oppression
of its Fre