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 investigations upon a diligent study of public records, state-papers, and notes of contemporary observers.[3] The same men prepared themselves for the task of criticism by a profound study of ethical and political philosophy in the works of Aristotle, Plato, Cicero, and Tacitus.[4] They examined the methods of classical historians, and compared the annals of Greece, Rome, and Palestine with the chronicles of their own country.  They attempted to divine the genius and to characterize the special qualities of the nations, cities, and individuals of whom they had to treat.[5] At the same time they spared no pains in seeking out persons possessed of accurate knowledge in every branch of inquiry that came beneath their notice, so that their treatises have the freshness of original documents and the charm of personal memoirs.  Much, as I have elsewhere noted, was due to the peculiarly restless temper of the Florentines, speculative, variable, unquiet in their politics.  The very qualities which exposed the commonwealth to revolutions, developed the intelligence of her historians; her want of stability was the price she paid for intellectual versatility and acuteness unrivaled in modern times. ’"O ingenia magis acria quam matura,” said Petrarch, and with truth, about the wits of the Florentines; for it is their property by nature to have more of liveliness and acumen than of maturity or gravity.’[6]

    [1] Since the Greeks, no people have combined curiosity and the love
    of beauty, the scientific and the artistic sense, in the same
    proportions as the Florentines.

[2] See Machiavelli’s critique of Lionardo d’Arezzo and Messer Poggio, in the Proemio to his Florentine History.  His own conception of history, as the attempt to delineate the very spirit of a nation, is highly philosophical.

[3] The high sense of the requirements of scientific history attained by the Italians is shown by what Giovio relates of Gian Galeazzo’s archives (Vita di Gio.  Galeazzo, p. 107).  After describing these, he adds:  ‘talche, chi volesse scrivere un’ historia giusta non potrebbe desiderare altronde ne piu abbondante