innocent, though he belonged to a great Ghibelline house. And for this sin, and for many others done by the wicked people, many wise persons say that God, for Divine judgment, permitted upon the said people the revenge and slaughter of Monteaperti." [Footnote: At least, the compound 'Mangia-pane,' 'munch-bread,' stands still for a good-for-nothing fellow.] 132. The sentence which I have last read introduces, as you must at once have felt, a new condition of things. Generally, I have spoken of the Ghibellines as infidel, or impious; and for the most part they represent, indeed, the resistance of kingly to priestly power. But, in this action of Florence, we have the rise of another force against the Church, in the end to be much more fatal to it, that of popular intelligence and popular passion. I must for the present, however, return to our immediate business; and ask you to take note of the effect, on actually existing Florentine architecture, of the political movements of the ten years we have been studying. 133. In the revolution of Candlemas, 1248, the successful Ghibellines throw down thirty-six of the Guelph palaces. And in the revolution of July, 1258, the successful Guelphs throw down _all_ the Ghibelline palaces. Meantime the trades, as against the Knights Castellans, have thrown down the tops of all the towers above seventy-five feet high. And we shall presently have a proposal, after the battle of the Arbia, to throw down Florence altogether. 134. You think at first that this is remarkably like the course of republican reformations in the present day? But there is a wide difference. In the first place, the palaces and towers are not thrown down in mere spite or desire of ruin, but after quite definite experience of their danger to the State, and positive dejection of boiling lead and wooden logs from their machicolations upon the heads below. In the second place, nothing is thrown down without complete certainty on the part of the overthrowers that they are able, and willing, to build as good or better things instead; which, if any like conviction exist in the minds of modern republicans, is a wofully ill-founded one: and lastly, these abolitions of private wealth were coincident with a widely spreading disposition to undertake, as I have above noticed, works of public utility, _from which no dividends were to be received by any of the shareholders_; and for the execution of which the _builders received no commission on the cost_, but payment at the rate of so much a day, carefully adjusted to the exertion of real power and intelligence.