his flashes of insight. The Florentines (p. 71 sqq.) begin to take pleasure in describing themselves;[767] and basking in the well-earned sunshine of their intellectual glory, their pride seems to attain its height when they derive the artistic pre-eminence of Tuscany among Italians, not from any special gifts of nature, but from hard patient work.[768] The homage of famous men from other parts of Italy, of which the sixteenth Capitolo of Ariosto is a splendid example, they accepted as a merited tribute to their excellence. An admirable description of the Italians, with their various pursuits and characteristics, though in few words and with special stress laid on the Lucchese, to whom the work was dedicated, was given by Ortensio Landi, who, however, is so fond of playing hide-and-seek with his own name, and fast-and-loose with historical facts, that even when he seems to be most in earnest, he must be accepted with caution and only after close examination.[769] The same Landi published an anonymous ‘Commentario’ some ten years later,[770] which contains among many follies not a few valuable hints on the unhappy ruined condition of Italy in the middle of the century.[771] Leandro Alberti[772] is not so fruitful as might be expected in his description of the character of the different cities. To what extent this comparative study of national and local characteristics may, by means of Italian humanism, have influenced the rest of Europe, we cannot say with precision. To Italy, at all events, belongs the priority in this respect, as in the description of the world in general. CHAPTER VII. DESCRIPTION OF THE OUTWARD MAN. But the discoveries made with regard to man were not confined to the spiritual characteristics of individuals and nations; his outward appearance was in Italy the subject of an entirely different interest from that shown in it by northern peoples.[773] Of the position held by the great Italian physicians with respect to the progress of physiology, we cannot venture to speak; and the artistic study of the human figure belongs, not to a work like the present, but to the history of art. But something must here be said of that universal education of the eye, which rendered the judgment of the Italians as to bodily beauty or ugliness perfect and final.