Three generations of the masked Medicean despotism had destroyed the reality of freedom in Florence, and had corrupted her citizens to the core.

Yet, strange to say, it was at the end of the fifteenth century that the genius of the thirteenth revived.

Italian literature was cultivated for its own sake under the auspices of Lorenzo de' Medici.

The year 1494 marks the resurrection of the spirit of old liberty beneath the trumpet-blast of Savonarola's oratory.

Amid the universal corruption of public morals, from the depth of sloth and servitude, when the reality of liberty was lost, when fate and fortune had combined to render constitutional reconstruction impossible for the shattered republics of Italy, the intellect of the Florentines displayed itself with more than its old vigor in a series of the most brilliant political writers who have ever illustrated one short but eventful period in the life of a single nation.