It is, nevertheless, the leading fault of this very great book to have had too many touches already. Guicciardini, like Gibbon, thought much of his dignity, and assumed his historical as poets are said to assume their singing robes. He dropped the easy and vigorous style in which his fragment upon Florentine history had been composed in his youth, and wrote in a dignified and ambitious manner for which nature did not qualify him. Hence he is tedious, and the impression of tameness is enhanced by the unsatisfactory character of the incidents narrated, and the author’s general deficiency in enthusiasm. With all these defects it is still one of the most valuable histories ever written. It might be entitled the History of the Decline and Fall of Italy, from the French invasion in 1494. For us the sadness of the picture is relieved by our knowledge of the splendour of literature and art in an age of complete dissolution of the body politic; but these redeeming circumstances do not enter into Guicciardini’s view: he can only write as Polybius wrote of the downfall of Greece. He has much in common with this historian: both men of affairs; both largely concerned with the events they describe; both embittered by public calamities and contemptuous of the capacity of their countrymen; both patriotic children of a ruined state, while compelled, and not wholly averse, to adopt intimate association with the conqueror; neither of them the master of a good style, but compensating this defect by good sense and the invaluable political lessons they derive from the transactions they record. Another statesman-historian, Ranke, has brought heavy charges against Guicciardini, both of plagiarism and of wilful manipulation of facts, but he seems to have been successfully answered by Signor Villari in his Life of Machiavelli. Villari, who has had access to the archives of Guicciardini’s family, is able to show the extent to which he availed himself of MS. materials, and his care in working them up into his history. Many of his statements which have since been shown to be erroneous, were in conformity with the general belief of his time.