Truly, however, there is no other city in Europe just like Florence; it has all the distinction of great individuality. My mood changed about, at times, as I thought of the different periods of its history, the splendor of its ambitions or the brutality of its methods; but when I was in the presence of some of its perfect works of art, such as Botticelli’s “Spring” in the Belle Arti, or Michelangelo’s “Tombs of the Medici” in San Lorenzo, or Titian’s “Magdalen,” or Raphael’s “Leo X” in the Pitti, or Benozzo Gozzoli’s fresco (the journey of the three kings to Bethlehem) in the old Medici Palace, then I was ready to believe that nothing could be finer than Florence. I realized now that of all the cities in Europe that I saw Florence was possessed of the most intense art atmosphere,--something that creeps over your soul in a grim realistic way and causes you to repeat over and over: “Amazing men worked here--amazing men!” It was so strange to find driven home to me,--even more here than in Rome, that illimitable gulf that divides ideality of thought and illusion from reality. Men painted the illusions of Christianity concerning the saints and the miracles at this time better than ever before or since, and they believed something else. A Cosimo Medici who could patronize the Papacy with one hand and make a cardinal into a pope, could murder a rival with the other; and Andrea del Castagno, who was seeking to shine as a painter of religious art--madonnas, transfigurations, and the like--could murder a Domenico Veneziano in order to have no rival in what he considered to be a permanent secret of how to paint in oils. The same munificence that could commission Michelangelo to design and execute a magnificent façade for San Lorenzo (it was never done, of course) could suborn the elective franchise of the people and organize a school on the lines of Plato’s Academy. In other words, in Florence as in the Court of Alexander VI at Rome, we find life stripped of all sham in action, in so far as an individual and his conscience were concerned, and filled with the utmost subtlety in so far as the individual and the public were concerned. Cosimo and Lorenzo de’ Medici, Andrea del Castagno, Machiavelli, the Pazzi, the Strozzi,--in fact, the whole “kit and kaboodle” of the individuals comprising the illustrious life that foregathered here, were cut from the same piece of cloth. They were, one and all, as we know, outside of a few artistic figures, shrewd, calculating, relentless and ruthless seekers after power and position; lust, murder, gormandizing, panoplizing, were the order of the day. Religion,--it was to be laughed at; weakness,--it was to be scorned. Poverty was to be misused. Innocence was to be seized upon and converted. Laughing at virtue and satisfying themselves always, they went their way, building their grim, dark, almost windowless palaces; preparing their dungeons and erecting their gibbets for their enemies. No wonder Savonarola saw