Marsilio Ficino always keeps in view the connection between Christianity and philosophy, both in his speculations and in the practical application of his principles and their corollaries. If we are astonished at the fantastic flights which seem to lead him far away from the course he had traced out for himself, we yet gain a clear and comprehensive development of the aim of his whole teaching, the attainment of the highest happiness by the individual as well as by the community, the end for which God created us. In the harmony between the spirit of government and the divine law, whence the written law is derived, he recognises the essential element of general well-being. As regards forms of government, he decides that many are good, if rightly administered—aristocracy, if its limits are not too narrow; democracy, if it produces respect for law. Mob rule is a polypus, all limbs and no head; tyranny has no legal ground and no legitimate limits. Monarchy would be preferable, if it could be maintained according to Plato’s ideal, by power and wisdom united. But the true end of all forms of government and civil constitutions, both in theory and practice, can be reached neither by the few nor by the many, but only by the co-operation of the united forces of the human race, by the maintaining and enforcing of uniform laws by a ruler who is raised above all enmity, ambition, and envy, because he is acknowledged and loved by all. The Christian Platonist, who lived to see the beginning of the new era, the dawn of which had been heralded by the school to which he attached himself, arrived at the summit of his philosophical and political speculations exactly at the same standpoint which the greatest poet of the middle ages had reached more than a century and a half before him, amid the conflict of parties in the State. Wide as was the difference between their positions and experiences of life, and between the civil and political conditions both of their own immediate home and of a large part of Italy, this is a remarkable circumstance, which explains the interest felt by Marsilio Ficino in that book, so diversely judged, in which Dante Alighieri developes his theory of monarchy—a work well-nigh forgotten, despised by the learned on account of its style, and sealed to the generality, till the Platonist of the Medicean times made it accessible to his contemporaries by a translation.