of the acts and doings of the Romans, I took style and manner from them, though, as a learner, I was not worthy of so vast a work.’  Like our own Gibbon, musing upon the steps of Ara Celi, within sight of the Capitol, and within hearing of the monks at prayer, he felt the genius loci stir him with a mixture of astonishment and pathos.  Then ’reflecting that our city of Florence, the daughter and the creature of Rome, was in the ascendant toward great achievements, while Rome was on the wane, I thought it seemly to relate in this new Chronicle all the doings and the origins of the town of Florence, as far as I could collect and discover them, and to continue the acts of the Florentines and the other notable things of the world in brief onwards so long as it shall be God’s pleasure, hoping in whom by His grace I have done the work rather than by my poor knowledge; and therefore in the year 1300, when I returned from Rome, I began to compile this book, to the reverence of God and Saint John and the praise of this our city Florence.’  The key-note is struck in these passages.  Admiration for the past mingles with prescience of the future.  The artist and the patriot awake together in Villani at the sight of Rome and the thought of Florence.

    [1] Lib. viii. cap. 36.

The result of this visit to Rome in 1300 was the Chronicle which Giovanni Villani carried in twelve books down to the year 1346.  In 1348 he died of the plague, and his work was continued on the same plan by his brother Matteo.  Matteo in his turn died of plague in 1362, and left the Chronicle to his son Filippo, who brought it down to the year 1365.  Of the three Villani, Giovanni is the greatest, both as a master of style and as an historical artist.  Matteo is valuable for the general reflections which form exordia to the eleven books that bear his name.  Filippo was more of a rhetorician.  He is known as the public lecturer upon the Divine Comedy, and as the author of some interesting but meager lives of eminent Florentines, his predecessors or contemporaries.

The Chronicle of the Villani is a treasure-house of clear and accurate delineations rather than of profound analysis.  Not only does it embrace the whole affairs of Europe in annals which leave little to be desired in precision of detail and brevity of statement; but, what is more to our present purpose, it conveys a lively picture of the internal condition of the Florentines and the statistics of the city in the fourteenth century.  We learn, for example, that the ordinary revenues of Florence amounted to about 300,000 golden florins,[1] levied chiefly by way of taxes—­90,200 proceeding from the octroi, 58,300 from the retail wine trade, 14,450 from the salt duties, and so on through the various imposts, each of which is carefully calculated.  Then we are informed concerning the ordinary expenditure of the Commune—­15,240 lire for the podesta and his establishment, 5,880 lire for the Captain of