Machiavelli’s _History of Florence_ is not, like his _Discourses_, a work of profound thought, nor is it authoritative in any respect. It rather exhibits him as the elegant and accomplished man of letters, and is perhaps the first successful restoration of the classical style of history to a European vernacular. His great contemporary Guicciardini had indeed anticipated him with a fragment on the same subject, but this long remained unpublished, and it is not likely that Machiavelli ever saw it. Machiavelli has not delved deep for materials; much of the early part of his history is taken almost literally from Flavio Biondo and other predecessors. He has sometimes departed unjustifiably from strict matter of fact, not by invention or serious misrepresentation, but by accentuating and slightly modifying actual incidents to give them the particular colour he desires. In the main, however, his work is a faithful as well as an animated picture of the public life of a community in its characteristics more nearly akin to the ancient commonwealth of Athens than any the earth has seen since this disappeared from her face. The quality which will preserve even a bad history, and without which a good one will only live as a book of reference, is never absent from Machiavelli’s--he entertains while he instructs. His work, which was composed after 1520 by order of Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici, is divided into eight books, and extends from the beginning of Florentine history to the death of Lorenzo de’ Medici in 1492. The intimate connection of Florence with the general course of Italian politics leads to frequent digressions and copious notices of neighbouring states. Another historical work of Machiavelli’s, the Life of Castruccio Castracani, Prince of Lucca in the fourteenth century, is little more than a romance, in which he has endeavoured to depict the ideal soldier and statesman. Machiavelli’s plays and poems will be noticed elsewhere. They in no respect detract from his reputation. He came nearer than any contemporary, except Leonardo da Vinci, to approving himself a universal genius. No man of his time stands higher intellectually, and his want of moral elevation is largely redeemed by his ample endowment with the one virtue chiefly needful to an Italian in his day, but of which too many Italians were destitute--patriotism.