ch of St. Mark's.

83. That debate was brought to its crisis and issue by the birth of the
new third elemental force of the State--the Citizen. Sismondi's
republican enthusiasm does not permit him to recognize the essential
character of this power. He speaks always of the Republics and the
liberties of Italy, as if a craftsman differed from a knight only in
political privileges, and as if his special virtue consisted in
rendering obedience to no master. But the strength of the great cities
of Italy was no more republican than that of her monasteries, or
fortresses. The Craftsman of Milan, Sailor of Pisa, and Merchant of
Venice are all of them essentially different persons from the soldier
and the anchorite:--but the city, under the banner of its _caroccio_,
and the command of its _podesta_, was disciplined far more strictly than
any wandering military squadron by its leader, or any lower order of
monks under their abbot. In the founding of civic constitutions, the
Lord of the city is usually its Bishop:--and it is curious to hear the
republican historian--who, however in judgment blind, is never in heart
uncandid, prepare to close his record of the ten years' war of Como with
Milan, with this summary of distress to the heroic mountaineers--that
"they had lost their Bishop Guido, who was their soul."

84. I perceive for quite one of the most hopeless of the many
difficulties which Modernism finds, and will find, insuperable either by
steam or dynamite, that of either wedging or welding into its own
cast-iron head, any conception of a king, monk, or townsman of the
twelfth and two succeeding centuries. And yet no syllable of the
utterance, no fragment of the arts of the middle ages, far less any
motive of their deeds, can be read even in the letter--how much less
judged in spirit--unless, first of all, we can somewhat imagine all
these three Living souls.

First, a king who was the best knight in his kingdom, and on whose own
swordstrokes hung the fate of Christendom. A king such as Henry the
Fowler, the first and third Edwards of England, the Bruce of Scotland,
and this Frederic the First of Germany.

Secondly, a monk who had been trained from youth in greater hardship
than any soldier, and had learned at last to desire no other life than
one of hardship;--a man believing in his own and his fellows'
immortality, in the aiding powers of angels, and the eternal presence of
God; versed in all the science, graceful in al