Cosmo was nearly forty when he succeeded to the riches and popularity of his father; and he had not only conducted for several years a commercial establishment which held counting-houses in all the principal cities of Europe and in the Levant, but had also participated in the weightier concerns of government. The form of the Florentine constitution was then democratical: the nobility had been long excluded from the administration of the republic; and the citizens, though divided into twenty-one guilds, or corporations of arts and trades, from seven of which alone the magistracy were chosen, had, however, an equal share in the nomination of the magistrates, who were changed every two months. The lower corporations, owing principally to the manœuvres of Salvestro de Medici, had risen in 1378 against the higher, demanding a still more complete equality, and had taken the direction of the commonwealth into their own hands; but after having raised a carder of wool to the supreme power, and involved themselves in the evils of anarchy, convinced at last of their own incapacity, they had again submitted to the wiser guidance of that kind of burgher-aristocracy which they had subverted; and that party, headed by the Albizzi and some other families of distinction, had, ever since 1382, governed the state with unexampled happiness and glory. The republic had been aggrandized by the important acquisition of Leghorn, Pisa, Arezzo, and other Tuscan cities; its agriculture was in the most prosperous condition; its commerce had received a prodigious developement; its decided superiority in the cultivation of literature, the sciences, and the arts, had placed it foremost in the career of European civilization; and its generous but wise external policy had constituted it as the guardian of the liberties of Italy. [Illustration: _Engraved by C. E. Wagstaff._ LORENZO DE MEDICI. _From a Print by Raffaelle Morghen, after a Picture by G. Vasari._ Under the Superintendance of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. _London. Published by Charles Knight, Pall Mall East._ ]