politics, in that involved and stormy period, is unravelled with a patience and an insight that are above praise. It is the crowning merit of the author that he never ceases to be an impartial spectator--a cold and curious critic. We might compare him to an anatomist, with knife and scalpel dissecting the dead body of Italy, and pointing out the symptoms of her manifold diseases with the indifferent analysis of one who has no moral sensibility. This want of feeling, while it renders Guicciardini a model for the scientific student, has impaired the interest of his history. Though he lived through that agony of the Italian people, he does not seem to be aware that he is writing a great historical tragedy. He takes as much pains in laying bare the trifling causes of a petty war with Pisa as in probing the deep-seated ulcer of the papacy. Nor is he capable of painting the events in which he took a part, in their totality as a drama. Whatever he touches, lies already dead on the dissecting table, and his skill is that of the analytical pathologist. Consequently, he fails to understand the essential magnitude of the task, or to appreciate the vital vigour of the forces contending in Europe for mastery. This is very noticeable in what he writes about the Reformation. Notwithstanding these defects, inevitable in a writer of Guicciardini's temperament, the _Storia d'Italia_ was undoubtedly the greatest historical work that had appeared since the beginning of the modern era. It remains the most solid monument of the Italian reason in the 16th century, the final triumph of that Florentine school of philosophical historians which included Machiavelli, Segni, Pitti, Nardi, Varchi, Francesco Vettori and Donato Giannotti. Up to the year 1857 the fame of Guicciardini as a writer, and the estimation of him as a man, depended almost entirely upon the _History of Italy_, and on a few ill-edited extracts from his aphorisms. At that date his representatives, the counts Piero and Luigi Guicciardini, opened their family archives, and committed to Signor Giuseppe Canestrini the publication of his hitherto inedited MSS. in ten important volumes. The vast mass of documents and finished literary work thus given to the world has thrown a flood of light upon Guicciardini, whether we consider him as author or as citizen. It has raised his reputation as a political philosopher into the first rank, where he now disputes the place of intellectual supremacy with his friend Machiavelli; but it has coloured our moral judgment of his character and conduct with darker dyes. From the stores of valuable materials contained in those ten volumes, it will be enough here to cite (1) the _Ricordi politici_, already noticed, consisting of about 400 aphorisms on political and social topics; (2) the observations on Machiavelli's _Discorsi_, which bring into remarkable relief the views of Italy's two great theorists on statecraft