In spite of the Machiavellian conception of history, the sixteenth century was to see the introduction of the experimental method, as practised in natural science, in the treatment of history at the hands of no less a man than Guicciardini. His _Storia d’Italia_ is in twenty books and covers the period between 1494 and 1534, thus beginning with the invasion of Charles VIII of France and ending with the fall of Florence. Francesco de Sanctis, with the heart of a man of the Risorgimento, commenting upon this work, so remarkable from many points of view, says that the historical period of which it treats could rightly have been called “The Tragedy of Italy,” but that the historian has not the slightest notion either of the unity or of the import of this tragic drama. One could object to the great critic that to realise such oneness of drama was impossible to Guicciardini, as the tragedy had its root in the historian’s unconsciousness of this oneness or rather of the possibility of this oneness, since such oneness did not exist in Italy when Guicciardini wrote, except perhaps in the heart of his friend Machiavelli. People of other countries provided them with the political events and the philosophical theories that kept their brains going. The works of Grotius were taken and easily studied in the land of jurisprudence, for the studies that went on flourishing were law and history. But the purpose was a sterile erudition, at least at the moment, for apathy had reached such a superlative degree that the martyrdom of men like Bruno and Socino passed unheeded—worse than unheeded, not understood—so that it is absurd to hear modern Free-thinkers reproach the Church with the death of Bruno, who was far from questioning the right of the Church to burn him. The Church in its practical policy, like all the institutions in Italy, was lacking in ideas and in life. The centre of civilisation had moved northward, and south of the Alps people were getting more and more away from it, more and more effeminate. In a land where indifference was the shroud of a martyr, Churchmen who knew Bruno for the heretic he truly was could not be expected to realise that apart from his heresy he had given the world an idea that would enable modern thought to realise the part played by religion in man’s life and to reject the very idea which had severed man from authority. The seventeenth century, inaugurated in Italy by the burning of Bruno, had in literature little to boast of besides the _Jerusalemme liberata_ of Tasso, for it began with the _Arcadia_ of Sannazaro and ended with the _Arcadia_ of Guarini. On the other hand Campanella, the most eminent philosopher, was not the only one. Although the philosophers became less and less original they maintained a sufficient theoretical interest to accept all that France and England were throwing on the world.