is experience, move the world. That the
strong should trample on the weak, that the wily should circumvent the
innocent, that hypocrisy and fraud and dissimulation should triumph,
seems to him but natural. His whole theory of humanity is tinged with
the sad gray colors of a stolid, cold-eyed, ill-contented, egotistical
indifference. He is not angry, desperate, indignant, but phlegmatically
prudent, face to face with the ruin of his country. For him the world
was a game of intrigue, in which his friends, his enemies, and himself
played parts, equally sordid, with grave faces and hearts bent only on
the gratification of mean desires. Accordingly, though his mastery of
detail, his comprehension of personal motives, and his analysis of craft
are alike incomparable, we find him incapable of forming general views
with the breadth of philosophic insight or the sagacity of a frank and
independent nature. The movements of the eagle and the lion must be
unintelligible to the spider or the fox. It was impossible for
Guicciardini to feel the real greatness of the century, or to foresee
the new forces to which it was giving birth. He could not divine the
momentous issues of the Lutheran schism; and though he perceived the
immediate effect upon Italian politics of the invasion of the French, he
failed to comprehend the revolution marked out for the future in the
shock of the modern nations. While criticising the papacy, he discerned
the pernicious results of nepotism and secular ambition: but he had no
instinct for the necessity of a spiritual and religious regeneration.
His judgment of the political situation led him to believe that the
several units of the Italian system might be turned to profit and
account by the application of superficial remedies,--by the development
of despotism, for example, or of oligarchy, when in reality the decay of
the nation was already past all cure.

Two other masterpieces from Guicciardini's pen, the _Dialogo del
Reggimento di Firenze_ and the _Storia Fiorentina_, have been given to
the world during the last twenty years. To have published them
immediately after their author's death would have been inexpedient,
since they are far too candid and outspoken to have been acceptable to
the Medicean dynasty. Yet in these writings we find Guicciardini at his
best. Here he has not yet assumed the mantle of the rhetorician, which
in the _Istoria d' Italia_ sits upon him somewhat cumbrously. His style
is more