town of Florence, in having had two such notable writers to record its doings as Messer Lionardo and Messer Poggio; for up to the time of their histories everything was in the greatest obscurity.  If the republic of Venice, which can show so many wise citizens, had the deeds which they have done by sea and land committed to writing, it would be far more illustrious even than it is now.  And Galeazzo Maria, and Filippo Maria, and all the Visconti—­their actions would also be more famous than they are.  Nay, there is not any republic that ought not to give every reward to writers who should commemorate its doings.  We see at Florence that from the foundation of the city to the days of Messer Lionardo and Messer Poggio there was no record of anything that the Florentines had done, in Latin, or history devoted to themselves.  Messer Poggio follows after Messer Lionardo, and writes like him in Latin.  Giovanni Villani, too, wrote an universal history in the vulgar tongue of whatsoever happened in every place, and introduces the affairs of Florence as they happened.  The same did Messer Filippo Villani, following after Giovanni Villani.  These are they alone who have distinguished Florence by the histories that they have written.’[5] The pride of the citizen and a just sense of the value of history, together with sound remarks upon Venice and Milan, mingle curiously in this passage with the pedantry of a fifteenth-century scholar.

[1] Poggio’s Historia Populi Florentini is given in the XXth volume of Muratori’s collection.  Lionardo’s Istoria Fiorentina, translated into Italian by Donato Acciajuoli, has been published by Le Monnier (Firenze, 1861).  The high praise which Ugo Foscolo bestowed upon the latter seems due to a want of familiarity.

    [2] See the preface to the History of Florence, by Machiavelli.

    [3] Lionardo Bruni, for example, complains in the preface to his
    history that it is impossible to accommodate the rude names of his
    personages to a polished style.

    [4] Both Poggio and Lionardo began life as Papal secretaries; the
    latter was not made a citizen of Florence till late in his career.

    [5] Vite di Uomini Illustri.  Barbera, 1859; p. 425.

The historians of the first half of the sixteenth century are a race apart.  Three generations of pedantic erudition and of courtly or scholastic trifling had separated the men of letters from the men of action, and had made literature a thing of curiosity.  Three generations of the masked Medicean despotism had destroyed the reality of freedom in Florence, and had corrupted her citizens to the core.  Yet, strange to say, it was at the end of the fifteenth century that the genius of the thirteenth revived.  Italian literature was cultivated for its own sake under the auspices of Lorenzo de’ Medici.  The year 1494 marks the resurrection of the spirit of old liberty beneath the trumpet-blast of Savonarola’s