[1] It is to be hoped that the completion of Del Lungo’s work may put an end to the Compagni controversy, either by a solid vindication of the ‘Chronicle,’ or by so weak a defense as to render further partisanship impossible.  So far as his book has hitherto appeared, it contains no signs of an ultimate triumph.  The weightiest point contained in it is the discovery of the Ashburnham MS. If Del Lungo fails to prove his position, we shall be left to choose between Scheffer-Boichorst’s absolute skepticism or the modified view adopted by me in the text.

The two chief Florentine historians of the fifteenth century are Lionardo Bruni of Arezzo, and Poggio Bracciolini, each of whom, in his capacity of Chancellor to the Republic, undertook to write the annals of the people of Florence from the earliest date to his own time.  Lionardo Aretino wrote down to the year 1404, and Poggio Bracciolini to the year 1455.  Their histories are composed in Latin, and savor much of the pedantic spirit of the age in which they were projected.[1] Both of them deserve the criticism of Machiavelli, that they filled their pages too exclusively with the wars and foreign affairs in which Florence was engaged, failing to perceive that the true object of the historian is to set forth the life of a commonwealth as a continuous whole, to draw the portrait of a state with due regard to its especial physiognomy.[2] To this critique we may add that both Lionardo and Poggio were led astray by the false taste of the earlier Renaissance.  Their admiration for Livy and the pedantic proprieties of a labored Latinism made them pay more attention to rhetoric than to the substance of their work.[3] We meet with frigid imitations and bombastic generalities, where concise details and graphic touches would have been acceptable.  In short, these works are rather studies of style in an age when the greatest stylists were but bunglers and beginners, than valuable histories.  The Italians of the fifteenth century, striving to rival Cicero and Livy, succeeded only in becoming lifeless shadows of the past.  History dictated under the inspiration of pedantic scholarship, and with the object of reproducing an obsolete style, by men of letters who had played no prominent part in the Commonwealth,[4] cannot pretend to the vigor and the freshness that we admire so much in the writings of men like the Villani, Gino Capponi, Giovanni Cavalcanti, and many others.  Yet even after making these deductions, it may be asserted with truth that no city of Italy at this period of the Renaissance, except Florence, could boast historiographers so competent.  Vespasiano at the close of his biography of Poggio estimates their labor in sentences which deserve to be remembered:  ’Among the other singular obligations which the city of Florence owes to Messer Lionardo and to Messer Poggio, is this, that except the Roman Commonwealth no republic or free state in Italy has been so distinguished as the