promptitude by means of which he saved the commonwealth at a critical juncture (pp. 27-30), the interlocutors pass to an examination of the Medicean tyranny (pp. 34-49).  This is one of the masterpieces of Guicciardini’s analysis.  He shows how the administration of justice, the distribution of public honors, and the foreign policy of the republic were perverted by this family.  He condemns Cosimo’s tyrannical application of fines and imposts (p. 68), Piero the younger’s insolence (p. 46), and Lorenzo’s appropriation of the public moneys to his private use (p. 43).  Yet while setting forth the vices of this tyranny in language which even Sismondi would have been contented to translate and sign, Guicciardini shows no passion.  The Medici were only acting as befitted princes eager for power, although they crushed the spirit of the people, discouraged political ardor, extinguished military zeal, and did all that in them lay to enervate the nation they governed.  The scientific statist acknowledges no reciprocal rights and duties between the governor and the governed.  It is a trial of strength.  If the tyrant gets the upper hand, the people must expect to be oppressed.  If, on the other side, the people triumph, they must take good care to exterminate the despotic brood:  ’The one true remedy would be to destroy and extinguish them so utterly that not a vestige should remain, and to employ for this purpose the poignard or poison, as may be most convenient; otherwise the least surviving spark is certain to cause trouble and annoyance for the future’(p. 215).  The same precise criticism lays bare the weakness of democracy.  Men, says Guicciardini, always really desire their own power more than the freedom of the state (p. 50), and the motives even of tyrannicides are very rarely pure (pp. 53-54).  The governments established by the liberals are full of defects.  The Consiglio Grande, for example, of the Florentines is ignorant in its choice of magistrates, unjust in its apportionment of taxes, scarcely less prejudiced against individuals than a tyrant would be, and incapable of diplomatic foreign policy (pp. 58-69).  Then follows a discussion of the relative merits of the three chief forms of government—­the Governo dell’ Uno, the Governo degli Ottimati, and the Governo del Popolo (p. 129).  Guicciardini has already criticised the first and the third.[1] He now expresses a strong opinion that the second is the worst which could be applied to the actual conditions of the Florentine Republic (p. 130).  His panegyric of the Venetian constitution (pp. 139-41) illustrates his plan for combining the advantages of the three species and obviating their respective evils.  In fact he declares for that Utopia of the sixteenth century—­the Governo Misto—­a political invention which fascinated the imagination of Italian statesmen much in the same way as the theory of perpetual motion attracted scientific minds in the last century.[2] What follows is an elaborate scheme for applying the