A people which accomplished such great things must have possessed unusual civic virtues, apart from their more brilliant intellectual qualities, and spite of the weaknesses and faults which the greatest of the sons of Florence has scourged in angry love and loving anger. A despot can in a short time heap splendour on splendour; the activity of spirit of a popular commonwealth is different and more steady. The two free States in which we meet with the most perfect expression of this, Venice and Florence, show that this is not dependent on the form of government, but on a firm will and clear conception. The Florentine people combined these in a high degree. In the midst of political troubles and civil disturbances they constantly advanced; the final gain was greater than the losses through momentary retrogression, however violent. The people were contented, frugal, industrious, and attached at all times to ancient customs. That great changes were gradually made in customs and modes of life was according to the law of all ages, and of natural development, though some aspects of it did not seem the most pleasing. Manners and feelings of those days, which the Paradiso in the ‘Divina Commedia’ describes with such incomparable beauty and at the same time with such melancholy, when ‘in the old encircling walls, Florence was peaceful, moderate, and modest,’ the ‘civic life so calm, so beautiful, the society so reliable,’—a state of things which the poet closes with the time ‘before Frederic had fought out his quarrel,’[51]—they indeed lay far behind him who has lent to their memory form and duration for all future time. But the greatest change was to come after his death. The influence of the numerous foreigners, especially the French and Frenchified Neapolitans who came with the Angevins and their regents, was by no means beneficial; and the various sumptuary laws which were to restrain the women point especially to the example set in 1326, by Charles Duke of Calabria and his consort, Marie of Valois, the parents of the unhappy Joanna I., with their whole court. Then came the times of the Duke of Athens; soon after, the pestilence with its evil results, which are open to all in the stories of the ‘Decamerone.’ Giovanni Villani, who died in the year 1348, says once that the Florentines of the thirteenth century in their simple life and poverty achieved more than those of his time in the midst of their wealth and luxury.