But to expect that a city dominated by ancient prejudices, connected by a thousand subtle ties not only with the rest of Italy but also with the states of Europe, and rotten to the core in many of its most important members, could be restored to pristine vigor by a doctrinaire however able, was chimerical.

The course of events contradicted this vain expectation.

Meanwhile a few clear-headed and positive observers were dimly conscious of the instability of merely speculative constitution-making.

Varchi, in a weighty passage on the defects of the Florentine republic, points out that its weakness arose partly from the violence of factions, but also in a great measure from the implicit faith reposed in doctors of the law.[2] The history of the Florentine Constitution, he says, is the history of changes effected by successions of mutually hostile parties, each in its own interest subverting the work of its predecessor, and each in turn relying on the theories of jurists, who without practical genius for politics make arbitrary rules for the control of state-affairs.

Yet even Varchi shares the prevailing conviction that the proper method is first to excogitate a perfect political system, and then to impress that like a stamp upon the material of the commonwealth.