seems to him but natural.  His whole theory of humanity is tinged with the sad gray colors of a stolid, cold-eyed, ill-contented, egotistical indifference.  He is not angry, desperate, indignant, but phlegmatically prudent, face to face with the ruin of his country.  For him the world was a game of intrigue, in which his friends, his enemies, and himself played parts, equally sordid, with grave faces and hearts bent only on the gratification of mean desires.  Accordingly, though his mastery of detail, his comprehension of personal motives, and his analysis of craft are alike incomparable, we find him incapable of forming general views with the breadth of philosophic insight or the sagacity of a frank and independent nature.  The movements of the eagle and the lion must be unintelligible to the spider or the fox.  It was impossible for Guicciardini to feel the real greatness of the century, or to foresee the new forces to which it was giving birth.  He could not divine the momentous issues of the Lutheran schism; and though he perceived the immediate effect upon Italian politics of the invasion of the French, he failed to comprehend the revolution marked out for the future in the shock of the modern nations.  While criticising the papacy, he discerned the pernicious results of nepotism and secular ambition:  but he had no instinct for the necessity of a spiritual and religious regeneration.  His judgment of the political situation led him to believe that the several units of the Italian system might be turned to profit and account by the application of superficial remedies,—­by the development of despotism, for example, or of oligarchy, when in reality the decay of the nation was already past all cure.

Two other masterpieces from Guicciardini’s pen, the Dialogo del Reggimento di Firenze and the Storia Fiorentina, have been given to the world during the last twenty years.  To have published them immediately after their author’s death would have been inexpedient, since they are far too candid and outspoken to have been acceptable to the Medicean dynasty.  Yet in these writings we find Guicciardini at his best.  Here he has not yet assumed the mantle of the rhetorician, which in the Istoria d’ Italia sits upon him somewhat cumbrously.  His style is more spontaneous; his utterances are less guarded.  Writing for himself alone, he dares to say more plainly what he thinks and feels.  At the same time the political sagacity of the statesman is revealed in all its vigor.  I have so frequently used both of these treatises that I need not enter into a minute analysis of their contents.  It will be enough to indicate some of the passages which display the literary style and the scientific acumen of Guicciardini at their best.  The Reggimento di Firenze is an essay upon the form of government for which Florence was best suited.  Starting with a discussion of Savonarola’s constitution, in which ample justice is done to the sagacity and