have been swayed by these passions in different
degrees. The artistic faculty, which owes its energy to the love of
beauty, has been denied to some; the philosophic faculty, which starts
with curiosity, to others; and some again have shown but little capacity
for amassing wealth by industry or calculation. It is rare to find a
whole nation possessed of all in an equal measure of perfection. Such,
however, were the Florentines.[1] The mere sight of the city and her
monuments would suffice to prove this. But we are not reduced to the
necessity of divining what Florence was by the inspection of her
churches, palaces, and pictures. That marvelous intelligence which was
her pride, burned brightly in a long series of historians and annalists,
who have handed down to us the biography of the city in volumes as
remarkable for penetrative acumen as for definite delineation and
dramatic interest. We possess picture-galleries of pages in which the
great men of Florence live again and seem to breathe and move, epics of
the commonwealth's vicissitudes from her earliest commencement, detailed
tragedies and highly finished episodes, studies of separate characters,
and idylls detached from the main current of her story. The whole mass
of this historical literature is instinct with the spirit of criticism
and vital with experience. The writers have been either actors or
spectators of the drama. Trained in the study of antiquity, as well as
in the council-chambers of the republic and in the courts of foreign
princes, they survey the matter of their histories from a lofty vantage
ground, fortifying their speculative conclusions by practical knowledge
and purifying their judgment of contemporary events with the philosophy
of the past. Owing to this rare mixture of qualities, the Florentines
deserve to be styled the discoverers of the historic method for the
modern world. They first perceived that it is unprofitable to study the
history of a state in isolation, that not wars and treaties only, but
the internal vicissitudes of the commonwealth, form the real subject
matter of inquiry,[2] and that the smallest details, biographical,
economical, or topographical, may have the greatest value. While the
rest of Europe was ignorant of statistics, and little apt to pierce
below the surface of events to the secret springs of conduct, in
Florence a body of scientific historians had gradually been formed, who
recognized the necessity of basing their in