Francesco de Sanctis realises it because he has lived for this oneness of Italy, thereby giving it the full reality of an historical person. Guicciardini was as interested in the calamities that befell the individuals as de Sanctis was in the tragedy of his country, and if he filled twenty books with the matter of two good books it was because Italy’s genius had lost for the time being its synthetic power. He was an accurate man, with immense knowledge and great acuteness of mind taking each fact in its most minute particularity, but losing sight of the importance of such events as the Reformation. He was a naturalist and uses the same methods as if he studied vegetables or minerals, looking into the intimate structure of facts to find out why they are as they are. Men therefore appear in his work like a product of Nature, whose actions are as fatally determined as those of an animal. It is impossible, therefore, to find in Guicciardini’s twenty books a single page alive with the feelings that throb in Machiavelli’s historical works; he keeps the calm brow of the naturalist counting the legs of an insect. And Italy, until Vico comes, will go on between these two ideas of history and society. Guicciardini sees man free in appearance, but in reality bound to act according to the determinations of his character, of his temperament, of his circumstances; and the wise historian can very nearly make out beforehand that what he shall do with the same approximate certainty with which the naturalist can tell the way the swallows will take when the wind and atmospheric pressure are known. Machiavelli foreshadows a kind of sociology and in his truly Italian synthetic view of history he sees the play of the various forces, spiritual forces, that make of the human world a different realm of reality from that of nature, where forces exclusively physical are at play. “Patria,” liberty, nationality, humanity, social classes, interests and passions, are to him forces that move man, but would never move a plant or a tree. But the fact is, to quote again De Sanctis, that Machiavelli is the starting point of a period and Guicciardini is the ultimate end of the preceding age.