all his love of liberty, is forced to admit that in his day the most powerful provinces of Italy had become incapable of freedom.  ’No accident, however weighty and violent, could ever restore Milan or Naples to liberty, owing to their utter corruption.  This is clear from the fact that after the death of Filippo Visconti, when Milan tried to regain freedom, she was unable to preserve it.’[1] Whether Machiavelli is right in referring this incapacity for self-government to the corruption of morals and religion may be questioned.  But it is certain that throughout the states of Italy, with the one exception of Venice, causes were at work inimical to republics and favorable to despotisms.

[1] Discorsi, i. 17.  The Florentine philosopher remarks in the same passage, ’Cities, once corrupt, and accustomed to the rule of a prince, can never acquire their freedom even though the prince with all his kith and kin be extirpated.  One prince is needed to extinguish another; and the city has no rest except by the creation of a new lord, unless one burgher by his goodness and his great qualities may chance to preserve its independence during his lifetime.’

It will be observed in this classification of Italian tyrants that the tenure of their power was almost uniformly forcible.  They generally acquired it through the people in the first instance, and maintained it by the exercise of violence.  Rank had nothing to do with their claims.  The bastards of Popes, who like Sixtus IV. had no pedigree, merchants like the Medici, the son of a peasant like Francesco Sforza, a rich usurer like Pepoli, had almost equal chances with nobles of the ancient houses of Este, Visconti, or Malatesta.  The chief point in favor of the latter was the familiarity which through long years of authority had accustomed the people to their rule.  When exiled, they had a better chance of return to power than parvenus, whose party-cry and ensigns were comparatively fresh and stirred no sentiment of loyalty—­if indeed the word loyalty can be applied to that preference for the established and the customary which made the mob, distracted by the wrangling of doctrinaires and intriguers, welcome back a Bentivoglio or a Malatesta.  Despotism in Italy as in ancient Greece was democratic.  It recruited its ranks from all classes and erected its thrones upon the sovereignty of the peoples it oppressed.  The impulse to the free play of ambitious individuality which this state of things communicated was enormous.  Capacity might raise the meanest monk to the chair of S. Peter’s, the meanest soldier to the duchy of Milan.  Audacity, vigor, unscrupulous crime were the chief requisites for success.  It was not till Cesare Borgia displayed his magnificence at the French Court, till the Italian adventurer matched himself with royalty in its legitimate splendor, that the lowness of his origin and the frivolity of his pretensions appeared in any glaring light.[1] In Italy