lity of servitude, in which ambition
and avarice took the place of patriotism; while the corruption of
morals, fostered by the Medici for the confirmation of their own
authority, was so widely spread as to justify Segni, Varchi, Giannotti,
Guicciardini, and Machiavelli in representing the Florentines as equally
unable to maintain their liberty and to submit to control.

The historical vicissitudes of Florence were no less remarkable than the
unity of Venice. If in Venice we can trace the permanent and corporate
existence of a state superior to the individuals who composed it,
Florence exhibits the personal activity and conscious effort of her
citizens. Nowhere can the intricate relations of classes to the
commonwealth be studied more minutely than in the annals of Florence. In
no other city have opinions had greater value in determining historical
events; and nowhere was the influence of character in men of mark more
notable. In this agitated political atmosphere the wonderful Florentine
intelligence, which Varchi celebrated as the special glory of the Tuscan
soil, and which Vasari referred to something felicitous in Tuscan air,
was sharpened to the finest edge.[1] Successive generations of practical
and theoretical statesmen trained the race to reason upon government,
and to regard politics as a science. Men of letters were at the same
time also prominent in public affairs. When, for instance, the exiles of
1529 sued Duke Alessandro before Charles V. at Naples, Jacopo Nardi drew
up their pleas, and Francesco Guicciardini rebutted them in the interest
of his master. Machiavelli learned his philosophy at the Courts of
France and Germany and in the camp of Cesare Borgia. Segni shared the
anxieties of Nicolo Capponi, when the Gonfalonier was impeached for high
treason to the state of Florence. This list might be extended almost
indefinitely, with the object of proving the intimate connection which
subsisted at Florence between the thinkers and the actors. No other
European community of modern times has ever acquired so subtle a sense
of its own political existence, has ever reasoned upon its past history
so acutely, or has ever displayed so much ingenuity in attempting to
control the future. Venice on the contrary owed but little to the
creative genius of her citizens. In Venice the state was everything: the
individual was almost nothing. We find but little reflection upon
politics, and no speculative philosophy of history