purer and more elegant latinity had to make a beginning outside, and often in opposition to the Universities. It spread far and wide during the fifteenth century, but always retained a literary and philosophical rather than a juridical character. Notwithstanding the greatness of its merits and aims, the Italian Commune has in it something of the transitory and mediæval; it constantly indicates a period of change. It is the germ from which, at a later time, modern society is to issue, but the birth cannot be accomplished until the germ itself is destroyed; consequently it always remained in a state of incessant transformation. Sprung from the conjunction of two different societies, the Roman and Germanic, it derived from the former the general idea of the State, from the latter individual liberty, local activity, and the force of special associations. The problem it had to solve, and that constitutes its essential life and history, lies precisely in its ceaseless efforts to harmonise those two elements which long remained not only separate but often opposed. Until complete fusion was effected by the destruction of the Commune itself, the contest continued to be waged, and was accompanied by inevitable disorder. In the Commune, government and public policy have an importance unknown to barbaric society, but the Commune still wears the character of a powerful assemblage of small associations rather than of a single society, or of a State in the true and strict sense of the word. Life indeed courses more swiftly through these numberless groups, and is quickened by their activity. Social vigour is chiefly to be looked for in family cliques, and in the Companies of the Arts and Trades, of the Nobles and of the Burghers, all of whom have laws, statutes, magistrates, and tribunals of their own. Hence arises an extraordinary interlacing of ordinances, of conflicting passions, of diverging or clashing interests. True individual liberty, true equality before the law is not yet understood; but the individual is trained and protected by the association to which he belongs, which lends him a certain degree of strength, and secures him an increasing share of freedom. These subsidiary groups, however, unlike those which we have already met with in the Germanic societies, cannot be separated, but must live together in the State, outside of which there is no reason for their existence. The infinite multiplication of these groups, their jealousies and continual jarrings and collisions, made the Republic all the more indispensable to them, all the more the object of their hopes and love. Every one of these merchant-citizens was ready to give his life for this Republic, on which, both in peace and in war, his own welfare and that of the various associations depended. The heads and leading members of these associations were privileged to sit in the Councils of the State, governed it as masters, and found it their only sure defence against