as plastic.  We may compare the whole of Guicciardini’s elaborate essay ‘Del Reggimento di Firenze’ (Op.  Ined. vol. ii.), as well as the ‘Discourses’ addressed by Alessandro de’ Pazzi, Francesco Vettori, Ruberto Acciaiuoli, Francesco Guicciardini, and Luigi Guicciardini, to the Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici, on the settlement of the Florentine Constitution in 1522 (Arch.  Stor. vol. i.).  Not one of these men doubted that his nostrum would effect the cure of the republic undermined by slow consumption.

    [2] St. Fior. lib. vi. cap. 4; vol. i. p. 294.

In this sense and to this extent were the republics of Italy the products of constructive skill; and great was the political sagacity educed among the Italians by this state of things.  The citizens reflected on the past, compared their institutions with those of neighboring states, studied antiquity, and applied the whole of their intelligence to the one aim of giving a certain defined form to the commonwealth.  Prejudice and passion distorted their schemes, and each successive modification of the government was apt to have a merely temporary object.  Thus the republics, as I have already hinted, lacked that safeguard which the Greek states gained by clinging each to its own character.  The Greeks were no less self-conscious in their political practice and philosophy; but after the age of the Nomothetae, when they had experienced nearly every phase through which a commonwealth can pass, they recognized the importance of maintaining the traditional character of their constitutions inviolate.  Sparta adhered with singular tenacity to the code of Lycurgus; and the Athenians, while they advanced from step to step in the development of a democracy, were bent on realizing the ideal they had set before them.

Religion, which in Greece, owing to its local and genealogical character, was favorable to this stability, proved in Italy one of the most potent causes of disorder.  The Greek city grew up under the protection of a local deity, whose blood had been transmitted in many instances to the chief families of the burgh.  This ancestral god gave independence and autonomy to the State; and when the Nomothetes appeared, he was understood to have interpreted and formulated the inherent law that animated the body politic.  Thus the commonwealth was a divinely founded and divinely directed organism, self-sufficing, with no dependence upon foreign sanction, with no question of its right.  The Italian cities, on the contrary, derived their law from the common jus of the Imperial system, their religion from the common font of Christianity.  They could not forget their origin, wrung with difficulty from existing institutions which preceded them and which still remained ascendant in the world of civilized humanity.  The self-reliant autonomy of a Greek state, owing allegiance only to its protective deity and its inherent Nomos, had no parallel in Italy outside Venice.  All the other republics were conscious of dependence on external power, and regarded themselves as ab initio artificial rather than natural creations.