to the plans of the Divine Providence, and the history of Rome raises the Roman State almost to Divine rank. Guelphs and Ghibellines find in the Roman Jurists and the Roman Legions arguments in support of their opposite claims, and when the advent of the _Signorie_ involved them in a common downfall, the consciousness of an unbroken descent from Rome could never after be erased from Italian mentality. The influence of Rome on all the mediæval institutions of Italy is obvious to anyone familiar with the period. But the Italians, at the dawn of modern history, were led by this unbroken tradition of Rome into a habit of going to Roman history and law for a solution of contemporary problems, and this, while it secured their supremacy in the field of jurisprudence, kept their mentality from developing on original and modern lines. Even when Italy seemed almost to have withdrawn from all competition in theoretical research, her jurists and historians stood out to proclaim the immortality of the national genius. The intimate relations of the past with the present could never be lost sight of by people who found in the political and legal activities of ancient Rome the principles from which arose their chief political idea, the dignity of man as a citizen. They overlooked the fact that such wonderful citizenship had never been bestowed on man as man, that the municipal liberties, the privileges of the _Collegia_, the rule over the barbarians, were the reward of the Romans, not the pre-ordained lot of Rome. Italian scholars felt with the deepest conviction that her genealogy alone endowed Italy with a primacy which they could not renounce. Even had they so wished they could not have been a modern nation in a modern world. The more they studied, the more did they convince themselves like Petrarch that they descended in an unbroken line from Marius and Sulla. Their historical mentality was already formed and they could not consider the human world otherwise than as a narrow collaboration of successive generations.