disastrous wars of invasion had begun, it might well have seemed even to patriots as though Florence needed a Mæcenas more than a Camillus. Therefore the prince who in his own person combined all accomplishments, who knew by sympathy and counsel how to stimulate the genius of men superior to himself in special arts and sciences, who spent his fortune lavishly on works of public usefulness, whose palace formed the rallying-point of wit and learning, whose council chamber was the school of statesmen, who expressed his age in every word and every act, in his vices and his virtues, his crimes and generous deeds, cannot be fairly judged by an abstract standard of republican morality. It is nevertheless true that Lorenzo enfeebled and enslaved Florence. At his death he left her socially more dissolute, politically weaker, intellectually more like himself, than he had found her. He had not the greatness to rise above the spirit of his century, or to make himself the Pericles instead of the Pisistratus of his republic. In other words, he was adequate, not superior, to Renaissance Italy. This, then, was the man round whom the greatest scholars of the third period assembled, at whose table sat Angelo Poliziano, Cristoforo Landino, Marsilio Ficino, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Leo Battista Alberti, Michael Angelo Buonarroti, Luigi Pulci. The mere enumeration of these names suffices to awake a crowd of memories in the mind of those to whom Italian art and poetry are dear. Lorenzo's villas, where this brilliant circle met for grave discourse or social converse, heightening the sober pleasures of Italian country life with all that wit and learning could produce of delicate and rare, have been so often sung by poets and celebrated by historians that Careggi, Caffagiolo, and Poggio a Cajano are no less familiar to us than the studious shades of Academe. 'In a villa overhanging the towers of Florence,' writes the austere Hallam, moved to more than usual eloquence by the spirit-stirring beauty of his theme, 'on the steep slope of that lofty hill crowned by the mother city, the ancient Fiesole, in gardens which Tully might have envied, with Ficino, Landino, and Politian at his side, he delighted his hours of leisure with the beautiful visions of Platonic philosophy, for which the summer stillness of an Italian sky appears the most congenial accompaniment.' As we climb the steep slope of Fiesole, or linger beneath the rose-trees that shed their petals from Careggi's garden walls, once more in our imagination 'the world's great age begins anew;' once more the blossoms of that marvellous spring unclose. While the sun goes down beneath the mountains of Carrara, and the Apennines grow purple-golden, and Florence sleeps beside the silvery Arno, and the large Italian stars come forth above, we remember how those mighty master spirits watched the sphering of new planets in the spiritual skies. Savonarola in his cell below once more sits brooding over the