had still political significance in this day of Italian degradation.  Meanwhile Francis I. treated his faithful allies with lukewarm tolerance.  The smaller fry of Italian potentates, worshipers of the rising sun of Spain, curried favor with their masters by insulting the republic’s representatives.  On their return to Florence, the ambassadors had to report a total diplomatic failure.  But this, far from breaking the untamable spirit of the Signory and people, prompted them in February to new efforts of resistance and to edicts of outlawry against citizens whom they regarded as traitors to the State.  Among the proscribed were Francesco Guicciardini, Roberto Acciaiuoli, Francesco Vettori, and Baccio Valori.  Of these men Francesco Guicciardini, Francesco Vettori, and Baccio Valori were attendant at Bologna upon the Pope.  They all adhered with fidelity to the Medicean party at this crisis of their country’s fate, and all paid dearly for their loyalty.  When Cosimo I., by their efforts, was established in the duchy, he made it one of his first cares to rid himself of these too faithful servants.  Baccio Valori was beheaded after the battle of Montemurlo in 1537 for practice with the exiles of Filippo Strozzi’s party.  Francesco Guicciardini, Francesco Vettori, and Roberto Acciaiuoli died in disgrace before the year 1543—­their only crime being that they had made themselves the ladder whereby a Medici had climbed into his throne, and which it was his business to upset when firmly seated.  For the heroism of Florence at this moment it would be difficult to find fit words of panegyric.  The republic stood alone, abandoned by France to the hot rage of Clement and the cold contempt of Charles, deserted by the powers of Italy, betrayed by lying captains, deluged on all sides with the scum of armies pouring into Tuscany from the Lombard pandemonium of war.  The situation was one of impracticable difficulty.  Florence could not but fall.  Yet every generous heart will throb with sympathy while reading the story of that final stand for independence, in which a handful of burghers persisted, though congregated princes licked the dust from feet of Emperor and Pontiff.

Charles had come to assume the iron and the golden crowns in Italy.  He ought to have journeyed to Monza or to S. Ambrogio at Milan for the first, and to the Lateran in Rome for the second of these investitures.  An Emperor of the Swabian House would have been compelled by precedent and superstition to observe this form.  It is true that the coronation of a German prince as the successor of Lombard kings and Roman Augusti, had always been a symbolic ceremony rather than a rite which ratified genuine Imperial authority.  Still the ceremony connoted many mediaeval aspirations.  It was the outward sign of theories that had once exerted an ideal influence.  To dissociate the two-fold sacrament from Milan and from Rome was the same as robbing it of its main virtue, the virtue of a mystical