scious treatise on the model historian. Accuracy, patience,
love of truth, sincerity in criticism, and laborious research, have
all their proper place assigned to them. Compare Guicciardini,
_Ricordi_, No. cxliii., for sound remarks upon the historian's duty
of collecting the statistics of his own age and country.

[4] The prefaces to Giannotti's critiques of Florence and of Venice
show how thoroughly his mind had been imbued with the _Politics_ of
Aristotle. Varchi acknowledges the direct influence of Polybius and
Tacitus. Livy is Machiavelli's favorite.

[5] On this point the Relazioni of Italian ambassadors are
invaluable. What dryly philosophical compendia are the notes of
Machiavelli upon the French Court and Cesare Borgia! How astute are
the Venetian letters on the opinions and qualities of the Roman
Prelates!

[6] Guicc. _Ricordi_, cciii. _Op. Ined._ vol. i. p. 229.

The year 1300 marks the first development of historical research in
Florence. Two great writers, Dante Alighieri and Giovanni Villani, at
this epoch pursued different lines of study, which determined the future
of this branch of literature for the Italians. It is not
uncharacteristic of Florentine genius that while the chief city of
Tuscany was deficient in historians of her achievements before the date
which I have mentioned, her first essays in historiography should have
been monumental and standard-making for the rest of Italy. Just as the
great burghs of Lombardy attained municipal independence somewhat
earlier than those of Tuscany, so the historic sense developed itself in
the valley of the Po at a period when the valley of the Arno had no
chronicler. Sire Raul and Ottone Morena, the annalists of Milan, Fra
Salimbene, the sagacious and comprehensive historian of Parma,
Rolandino, to whom we owe the chronicle of Ezzelino and the tragedy of
the Trevisan Marches, have no rivals south of the Apennines in the
thirteenth century. Even the Chronicle of the Malespini family, written
in the vulgar tongue from the beginning of the world to the year 1281,
which occupies 146 volumes of Muratori's Collection, and which used to
be the pride of Tuscan antiquarians, has recently been shown to be in
all probability a compilation based upon the Annals of Villani.[1] This
makes the clear emergence of a scientific sense for history in the year
1300 at Florence all the more remarkable. In order to estimate