In Florence Lorenzo de' Medici, to whose bright name history has done justice, at the expense perhaps of some coeval stars in the Italian hemisphere, had died a few months before Innocent VIII. He was happy in living during a breathing time of comparative tranquillity, which he had been not uninstrumental in preserving, and which it was perhaps his good fortune not to survive. He had lived long enough to gain an imperishable fame, and passed from life just before the golden age, of which he was the signal ornament, began to be dimmed by influences which he and his family were instrumental in promoting. Our admiration of the assiduous and enlightened encouragement bestowed by him, and by his son Leo X., upon letters and art, ought not to blind us to the melancholy truths that the theoretical paganism of Lorenzo, the practical worldliness of Leo, and the disastrous blundering of Clement VII., have left upon the religion, the nationality, and the public spirit of Italy, effects which counterbalance that vast impulse to genius which the two first had the power to create, without the judgment and virtue to direct. Lorenzo the Magnificent was succeeded in his authority by his eldest son Pietro; but as that was founded exclusively upon personal claims, and unsupported either by official or hereditary dignities, it quickly passed from his feeble hands. It was the folly of this Pietro that supplied a train to the smouldering elements which we have endeavoured in this digression to analyse, and which, had his father been spared, might have been welded into a compact aggregate calculated to withstand barbarian aggression, instead of, as we shall now see, bursting into a simultaneous and destructive conflagration.[240] [Footnote 240: Du Peloux, in a despatch addressed to Charles V. in 1529, alluding to the distractions and miseries of Italy, in terms more appropriate to the period now under our review, observes "that there were two races who occasioned all its misfortunes, the Medici and the Sforza, and that it would be well for the world were both of them extirpated."--_Lanz Correspondenz._]