II. The point as to the lack of the right intellectual atmosphere under the princes can be proved by a comparison of products. The literature that is intellectually great, in the days before printing equalised and distributed cultures, belongs from first to last to Florence. Dante and Machiavelli are its terms; both standing for the experience of affairs in a disturbed but self-governing community; and it was in Florence that Boccaccio formed his powers. "Florentine art and letters, constituting the most fertile seeds of art and letters in Italy, were essentially republican; many writers, and most of the artists, of Florence were the offspring of traders or labouring men."[578] What the popes and the princes protected and developed was the literature of scholarship, their donations constituting an endowment of research. If the revival of classic learning and the rapid growth of art after the middle of the fifteenth century be held, as by some historians, to be the essence of the Renaissance,[579] then the Renaissance is largely the work of the despots. But even the artists and scholars patronised by Cosimo de' Medici were formed before his time,[580] and there is no proportional increase in number or achievement afterwards. On the other hand, it was _mere_ scholarship that the potentates fostered: Lorenzo Valla, welcomed for his _Elegantiae latinae linguae_, had barely escaped exile for his _De falsa donatione Constantini Magni_;[581] and it is impossible to show that they promoted thought save in such a case as the encouragement of the Platonic philosophy by Cosimo and Lorenzo. For the rest, the character of the humanists whom the potentates fostered is admittedly illaudable in nearly every case. Pomponius Lætus, who almost alone of his class bears scrutiny as a personality, expressly set his face against patronage, and sought to live as a free professor in the University of Rome.[582] And it is open to argument, finally, whether the princely patronage of the merely retrospective humanists did not check vital culture in Italy.[583] It is true that when "despotism" has been so long acquiesced in as to mean a stable social state, there may take place under it new forms of intellectual life. The later cases of Galileo and Vico would suffice to prove as much. But it will hardly be suggested that monarchic rule _evoked_ such forms of genius, any more than that the papacy was propitious to Galileo. In both cases the effective stimulant was foreign thought.