who desires two things more than any other things in the world, -first, the perpetual exaltation of this city [Florence] and of its liberty; secondly, the glory of our house, not during my own life only, but in perpetuity. May it please God to preserve and increase both one and the other!'

The present representatives of the house of Guicciardini, by whom these volumes are published, slightly apologise for revealing family secrets which had been kept for three centuries. Truly we know not any party in this nineteenth century, unless that of the Temporal Papacy, likely to feel scandalized at the publication of these imperii arcana of a bygone age. There is, indeed, enough in this long-deferred posthumous publication of the confidential communications of the favoured civil and military minister of two successive Popes to claim a place in the papal index, if the present conductors of that organ of ecclesiastical criticism can summon up courage to put it there. If they do, they will only give additional prominence to the fact that one of the most trusted and trustworthy servants of the Papacy, at the greatest ecclesiastical crisis, till that of our own times, confessed that, but for his personal position, he should have heartily wished Martin Luther all success against the 'scellerati preti.'

Guicciardini opens his 'Ricordi di Famiglia' by saying that he had been able to acquire no certain knowledge as to the origin of his family, but that the first notice he finds of it in Florence is as taking part in the exercise of the magistracy called the priorato about A.D. 1300. Our house,' he says, 'remained for a good while, that is to say, about eighty years afterwards, in a middling condition, and might be described, according to the common way of speaking, as buoni popolani. From that time it has grown so much in wealth and station, that it has become, and still continues at this day, one of the first families of the city, and has shared abundantly in all its honours and dignities.'

The first of his ancestors named by Guicciardini, Piero, assumed the rank of knighthood-by whom or on what account conferred his descendant could not tell. He acquired wealth in the management of large estates of a Neapolitan noble in Tuscany, and acquired, moreover, in the sharp eyes of the Church the character of an usurer, since his son Luigi, on the death of his father, was compelled, for fear his body should be seized at the suit of the bishop, to come to a composition with that holy inquisitor, and to tax himself on a conjectural estimate of the so-called usurious gains of the deceased; which done, he was fully assured by an Augustinian friar-a grandis

simo teologo-that the satisfaction thus given was sufficient etiam in foro conscientiæ. Luigi became afterwards a very rich man, arrived at high dignities, and was several times employed in important embassies to the Pope, to Giovanni Galeazzo Duke of Milan, and to Louis Duke of Anjou, when he entered Italy to contest the crown of Naples with King Charles of Arragon. He was three times Gonfalionere of Justice, and in that capacity would seem to have cut rather a poor figure, on occasion of a serious popular tumult, in the course of which the Gonfalionere got driven from the palace or Town Hall-the seat of municipal administration-ousted from his office, and his house demolished the invariable accompaniment of popular triumph over parties in power in Italy of the olden time-(revived under citizen Assi's Italianizing auspices against the house of M. Thiers) as torture was the invariable accompaniment of the first proceedings against any one accused of political crimes or misdemeanours. Besides being bullied (and afterwards invested with knighthood) by the populace and their leaders, he was continually getting surcharged in his taxes by the popular magistrates, and the greatest and most constant trouble of his life was in seeking redress from these fiscal surcharges. He died, says his descendant, to the great concern of the people, who seem to have found him a good easy executive functionary, a diplo matist disposed for peace at all price, and fiscally a good milch cow; a man of good property, on whom the municipal democracy found it convenient to throw more than his share of the public burthens.

It is a noticeable fact of family character or fortune that, wise or foolish, magnanimous or pusillanimous, well or less well governed in life and conversation, the Guicciardini family seem to have possessed the feline faculty of always falling upon their feet, and always adding something to that advance in substance and station which their famous descendant states them to have continued making down to his own time. Piero, second son of the last-named ancestor, had been, from his youth till the death of his father, disobedient and devious in his courses to such a degree that his father always prophesied he would end badly, and, having been robbed of certain sums of money and articles of value in his house, never could be persuaded, while the culprit remained undetected, that the culprit was not his son Piero. This scapegrace of the family was nearly becoming its scapegoat; since Piero, having set out against his father's will, in the suite of some embassy, was captured on his route by the free company of a certain Otto Buonterzo of Parma, and, while the others were suffered to proceed on their journey, was alone detained for

ransom,

ransom, on the strength of his father's reputation for riches. The ransom of Piero was set at so high a rate that his father delayed paying it, hoping that, in course of time, a less sum would be exacted. However, in his last illness he could think of no one but his son Piero, and gave orders that he should be redeemed from captivity forthwith, at the cost of three thousand ducats. Returning to Florence, Piero's next achievement within the year was a mercantile failure, mainly owing, says our historian, to his being a 'magnificent man,', and never looking into his accounts. Adversity, however, brought out the bright side of his nature, for, in his arrangements with his creditors, he stuck firmly to paying twenty shillings in the pound [solidi venti per lira], only asking for time, and at the time agreed upon actually paid up the full amount by means of sales of his property. This high and generous nature of his recommended him to the friendship of men of rank and distinction, and he attained all the public honours and dignities his city had to give.

'Thus aft a ragged cowte's been known
To mak' a noble aiver.'

The formerly suspected domestic thief was notably free from all taint of pecuniary rapacity or corruption; and if he had not 'put off the old man' altogether, his failings were in a different direction. He was rather high and rather short-tempered, and even in his old age, when he got angry with any one, was quite capable of proceeding from words to blows. Even in his old age he was vecchio lussurioso e feminacciolo forte, leaving lots of love letters, exchanged with the last mistress of his mature affections.

Another hereditary quality in the Guicciardini family may be considered as connected with that feline faculty, already noticed in them, of always falling upon their feet; the quality, namely, which we find, modified by individual differences, in our historian's paternal grandfather, his father, and himself, of marked aversion from extreme counsels and extreme courses. In the grandfather, Jacopo Guicciardini, born in 1422, this quality shows itself in very amiable as well as statesmanlike shape.

'Among his other properties,' says his grandson, the historian, he had that of saying freely what he thought; for which Lorenzo (de' Medici) sometimes manifested anger towards him, but most times bore with him, as knowing that it proceeded from goodness of nature. One of the public functions in Florence -of which he held many in succession, was that of Gonfalionere of Justice, in the earlier period of Lorenzo's real though dissembled

dissembled sovereignty. In that capacity he had to lend his formal and ministerial offices to carry through the new law regarding testaments, passed at the instance of Lorenzo de' Medici,- -a law which was in effect in the nature of a privilegium, solely designed to repress the ambition by crippling the means of his formidable rivals the Pazzi family. Jacopo Guicciardini, says his grandson, acted in this matter much against his own will, and had strongly dissuaded the passing of any such law, not only as a friend of the Pazzi family, but because the process seemed to him dishonest in itself, and likely to sow the seeds of mischief-as the event proved.' After the explo-. sion of the conspiracy of the Pazzi, and the tragical fate of all who had taken part in it and some who had taken no part in it, Lorenzo, says our historian, being mercilessly disposed against the whole family, either from natural temper or exasperation at the violent death of his brother, the wound he had himself received, and the narrow escape he had himself made from destruction, had thrown into prison the innocent sons of the Pazzi, who had no complicity in the plot; and had decreed that their daughters, who were left with small dowries, should form no matrimonial connections in Florence. Jacopo Guicciardini was incessant in his solicitations to Lorenzo to release these innocent youths, and at the utmost to 'confine' them, as it was called, from entering Florentine territory, and to relieve the daughters from the prohibition of marrying in their own country. After some years he finally persuaded Lorenzo to yield on both points.

The singular combination of mercantile with public business which occupied the active life of most of the statesmen of the Italian republics was remarkably exemplified in Jacopo Guicciardini, of whom his grandson says that, though he started on a small patrimony, he received a considerable dowry with his wife, which he turned to good account as commercial capital, as appears from a book kept by him, in which the net results of all his commercial transactions are briefly noted, as well as of all legitimate emoluments derived from his diplomatic and other public appointments, which, with his gains from commerce, made up, says his grandson, 'to a quattrino' the amount of property which he left behind him at his death, and made it manifest that he had abused none of his official opportunities to usurp the property of others or procure for himself exemptions from public taxation. He acted as captain of a commercial galley of his own in a voyage to the Levant, and as military commander, at a pinch, in the little wars of the Florentine Republic. It is added that he always applied his best efforts

to

to disperse ill-humours in the commonwealth, and never chose to play the part of public informer or State inquisitor. His descendant adds, for the edification of the Guicciardini family of the future, that he was exceedingly well endowed by nature, being tall, fair, and handsome-as fine a man as any of his time in Florence. The only drawbacks from his natural and acquired good gifts were that he was totally illiterate-we must understand our historian to mean in the humane letters' of universities, since Jacopo Guicciardini must have had work-day letters enough at least to keep his ledgers and carry on correspondence with his employers in his various missions. His good natural capacity, his courageous, liberal, friendly, and serviceable spirit, seem to have fully compensated with his contemporaries for his lack of polite literature; and his freedom from all malignant vices made them wink hard at certain dulcia vitia which did attach to him. According to his grandson's unreserved testimony, he was somewhat more licentious in his amours, and, moreover, somewhat more studious of his eating and drinking, than might have been expected of a man of his otherwise distinguished qualities.

Piero, the father of our historian, sustained the character of the Guicciardini family, though rather in a negative than positive manner, for sagacity and sound judgment in affairs private or public, and avoidance of all extreme parts, which led him to the other extreme of taking no part at all. Whether, says his son, he was so formed by nature, or whether the course of events, which indeed was violent and extraordinary in the times he lived in, seemed to require corresponding caution and circumspection, so it was that he proceeded in his affairs with little spirit and much suspiciousness, undertaking few enterprises, acting in affairs of State with great slowness and deliberation, and never, except when constrained by conscience or necessity, distinctly declaring his sentiments on matters of importance. Hence it happened that, never putting himself forward as the head of a party or any new movement, he did not keep himself so currently as he might have done in the mouths of the many. His son, however, admits that this mode of action or inaction served one purpose at least: that through all the turbulent movements which took place in his time he preserved his dignity and tranquillity, more fortunate in that respect than any other man of his standing and eminence, all of whom incurred in those times dangers either of life or property.

Our historian says for himself that he wished to enter the Church, not to participate, 'like most other priests,' in its fat slumbers, but because he calculated, with great colour of reason,

that