large
schemes of public policy, the tenderest poetry with brutal outrage and
lust, the art of Giotto with the slow, patient bloodthirst of the
vendetta.

What was the cause--the question presses on us through every page of
Dino or of Dante--what was the cause of that ruin which waited in
Florence as in every Italian city on so short a burst of freedom? What
was it that foiled alike the counsel of statesmen and the passionate
love of liberty in the people at large? What was it which drove Dante
into exile and stung the simple-hearted Dino into a burst of eloquent
despair? The answer--if we set aside the silly talk about "democracy"
and look simply at the facts themselves--is a very simple one. The ruin
of Florentine liberty, like the ruin of liberty elsewhere throughout
Italy, lay wholly with its _noblesse_. It was equally perilous for an
Italian town to leave its nobles without the walls or to force them to
reside within. In their own robber-holds or their own country estates
they were a scourge to the trader whose wains rolled temptingly past
their walls. Florence, like its fellow Italian States, was driven to the
demolition of the feudal castles, and to enforcing the residence of
their lords within its own civic bounds. But the danger was only brought
nearer home. Excluded by civic jealousy, wise or unwise, from all share
in municipal government, their huge palazzi rose like fortresses in
every quarter of the city. Within them lay the noble, a wild beast all
the fiercer for his confinement in so narrow a den, with the old tastes,
hatreds, preferences utterly unchanged, at feud as of old with his
fellow-nobles, knit to them only by a common scorn of the burghers and
the burgher life around them, stung to madness by his exclusion from all
rule in the commonwealth, bitter, revengeful, with the wilfulness of a
child, shameless, false, unprincipled.

The story which lies at the opening of the great feud between Guelph and
Ghibelline in Florence throws a picturesque light on the temper of its
nobility. Buondelmonte, the betrothed lover of a daughter of Oderigo
Giantrufetti, passes beneath a palace of the Donati at whose window
stands Madonna Aldruda with her two fair daughters. Seeing him pass by
Aldruda calls aloud to him, pointing with her finger to the damsel by
her side. "Whom have you taken to wife?" she says, "This is the wife I
kept for you." The damsel pleased the youth, but his troth bound him,
and he answered, "