power to maintain their positions with the Prætorian Guard and the Patrician Class (which was really the Roman world, so far as they were concerned) was largely financial and organizing in the same peculiar spirit in which we find those qualities operating to-day. It is not until the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in Italy, Flanders and north Germany that one encounters financial types very like those with which we have been very recently dealing. Italy of the Renaissance found a most interesting specimen of this type of mind in Cosimo I. of the Medici--“Pater Patriæ,” as he was called--who was little more than a very active Vanderbilt I. of his day. The family first conducted a successful pill business, then Cosimo engaged in the banking business. Being a financier he secured control of nearly all the financial channels of Italy, France, Greece, a portion of Egypt, and the Lowlands. It is charged that he brought about the death of one or two enemies in Florence, not because he disliked them, but because he thought they were dangerous to his interests, and once he came very near to being gibbeted himself. He was a patron of the arts, not so much because he was emotionally and poetically enthusiastic about art as because, as at present, it was a distinguished thing to be. The trick of currying favor via art patronage is old. His descendants, having less of his force and more of the refinement which invariably follows wealth, did more for art and less for trade, and so while we see the Medici family identified with the most brilliant period of Italian art we also see it slowly sinking into financial and political insignificance. That it finally degenerated and passed out is no reflection on the significance of Cosimo, his primary import. Although the coldest and most financial of them all, he was also the best. This was equally true of Louis XIV of France and Frederick the Great of Germany, organizing and financial types both, although monarchs by birth.