To have heard of Gian-Galeazzo Visconti, and to mistake him for a 'petty lord,' is really the greater sin of the two. Such an error could only arise either from a profound reverence for a mere title, or else from an incapacity to look beyond the extent which a country occupies on the map. The Lord of Milan was not a King; till he received the ducal coronet he did not belong to any class of acknowledged sovereigns; his territory was far smaller than that of France or England or Castile. But in wealth, in population, in every element of material prosperity, this petty' territory surpassed every land beyond the Alps, and its rulers directed its resources with a far more absolute command than princes of higher dignity held over their wider domains. Gibbon remarks that, when John Palaiologos came to Ferrara, the Roman Emperor of the East found in the Marquess of that city a sovereign more powerful than himself. In like manner the 'petty lord' of Milan was in very truth a prince of greater weight in European politics than the Bohemian Cæsar of whom, for an empty title, he stooped to profess himself the vassal.

The fact is that many of the particular facts of Italian history, as they are extremely hard to remember, are really 'by no means worth remembering. The particular event, looked at by itself, touched perhaps the interests only of an inconsiderable district, and it had no great direct influence over the particular events which followed it. The same stages repeat themselves over again in the history of a hundred cities; every town gradually wins and as gradually loses its liberties; in each the demagogue stealthily grows into the chief of the commonwealth; in each the chief of the commonwealth stealthily or forcibly grows into the Tyrant; in many the Tyrant or his successor wins an outward legitimacy for the wrong by some ceremony which admits him into the favoured order of acknowledged sovereigns. The general outline of events in a few of the greater states should of course be carefully remembered; but, beyond this, little can be attempted, except the general picture which the details serve to produce, and the deep political lessons

which ought to be drawn from its contemplation. We read the details, and we are content to forget them; but we keep in our memories the great characteristics of one of the most stirring times of man's being. We learn that the powers of the human heart and intellect are not dwarfed or cramped by confinement to a seemingly narrow field of action. We learn that the citizen of the pettiest commonwealth is a being of a higher nature than the slave of the mightiest despotism. We learn that man, under the same circumstances, is essentially the same in the most distant times and countries. The small commonwealths of Italy could not help playing over again a part essentially the same as that which the small commonwealths of Greece had played so many ages earlier.

Rightly to treat a history of this kind is indeed a hard, if a noble, task, and it calls for an historical genius of the highest order. It is no small matter to group and harmonize together the contemporary stories of endless states all full of life and energy; at once to avoid wearying the reader with needless detail, and to avoid confounding him between five or six parallel streams of narrative. The task has been accomplished in a manner perhaps as nearly approaching perfection as human nature allows in the immortal work of Sismondi. If even in his pages weariness sometimes creeps over us as we follow the endless series of wars and revolutions, it is soon forgotten in the eloquence with which he adorns the more striking portions of the narrative, and in the depth and clearness with which he draws forth the general teaching of the whole. If he fails in anything, it is in his arrangement of the parallel narratives. Italy often witnessed at the same moment a war of aggrandizement in Lombardy and a domestic revolution at Genoa or Florence. Rival Popes were troubling the Christian world with bulls and counter-bulls, with Councils and counter-Councils. Rival Kings meanwhile were wasting the fields of Campania and Apulia in quarrels wholly personal and dynastic. In reading the history of such times, we sometimes find that Sismondi hurries us rather too suddenly from place to place, and joins on one unfinished

narrative to another. He had not quite mastered that wonderful power by which Gibbon contrived to avoid confusion in describing the various contemporary events of a wider, though hardly a busier scene. As for graver charges against him, that Sismondi is a party writer may be freely confessed. But what historian who understands the time of which he writes can fail to be so? Sismondi draws republics in their best colours; Roscoe does the same by Popes and princes. The reader must make his option, and decide as he best may between the two contending advocates.*

The point of view which gives to medieval Italy its highest importance in the general history of mankind is one on which Sismondi himself has only partially entered. This is the point of view which takes in in a single glance the history of medieval Italy, and of ancient Greece. The really profitable task is to compare together the two periods in which the highest civilization of the age was confined to a cluster of commonwealths, small in point of territory, but rising, in all political and social enlightenment, far above the greatest contemporary empires. The two periods can never be understood unless they are studied in this way, side by side. Thucydides and Villani, Sismondi and Grote, should always lie open at the same moment. And close as is the analogy between the two periods, yet a subject of study perhaps still more profitable is afforded by the points of contrast which they suggest.

It may be well to pause at starting, in order to deal with an objection which may be brought against this whole treatment of the subject. Many students of history have a general dislike to any system of historical analogies. Nor can

* [I have struck out a paragraph of criticism on some modern English books of no great importance, but I have left what I said of Sismondi, as it records my impression of his work in itself, before I had read much of the original authorities of any part of his history. Since then I have, as I hope I have shown in my former volume of Essays, given some attention to the original sources of at least some parts of Italian history. But I have not since then read Sismondi through; I am therefore hardly able to say how far the comparison of his work with his authorities would either confirm or modify what I have said of him.]

the dislike be called wholly unreasonable, when we think of the extravagant and unphilosophical way in which such analogies have sometimes been applied. It is certain that no age can exactly reproduce any age which has gone before it, if only because that age has gone before it. The one is the first of its class, the other the second; the one is an original, the other is at least a repetition, if not a direct copy. And besides this, no two nations ever found themselves in exactly the same circumstances. Distance of space will modify the likeness between two societies, otherwise analogous, which are in being at the same time. Distance of time will bring in points of unlikeness between parallels which repeat themselves even on the same ground. In fact, in following out an analogy, it is often the points of unlikeness on which we are most tempted to dwell. But this is in very truth the most powerful of witnesses to their general likeness. We do not stop to think of differences in detail, unless the general picture presents a likeness which is broad and unmistakeable. We may reckon up the points of contrast between ancient Greece and mediæval Italy; but we never stop to count in how many ways a citizen of Athens differed from a subject of the Great King, or what are the points of unlikeness between the constitution of the United States from that of the Empire of all the Russias.

On the other hand, analogies which really exist are often passed by, merely because they lie beneath the surface. The essential likeness between two states of things is often disguised by some purely external difference. Thus, at first sight no difference can seem greater than that which we see between our present artificial state of society and politics and the primitive institutions of our forefathers before the Norman Conquest. Yet our position and sentiments are, in many important respects, less widely removed from that ruder time than from intermediate ages whose outward garb hardly differs from our own. In many cases, the old Teutonic institutions have come up again, silently and doubtlessly unwittingly, under new names, and under forms modified by altered circumstances.

Thus the Folcland of early times, the common estate of the nation, was, as the royal power increased, gradually turned into the Terra Regis, the personal estate of the sovereign. Now that the Crown lands are applied to the public service under the control of the House of Commons, what is it but a return to the old institution of Folcland in a shape fitted to the ideas of modern times ?* Again, the remark has been made that there can be no real likeness between ancient Athens and modern England, because the press, confessedly so important an engine among ourselves, had no being in the commonwealth of Periklês. The difference here is obvious at first sight; it is moreover the sign of a more real and more important difference; but neither of them is enough to destroy the essential analogy. The real difference is, not that the Athenians had no printing, but the far more important difference that they had very little writing. Now this is simply the difference which cannot fail to exist between the citizen of a southern state confined to a single city, and the citizen of an extensive kingdom in a northern climate. The one passed his life in the open air; the other is driven by physical necessity to the fireside either of his home or his club. The one could be personally present and personally active in the deliberations of the commonwealth; the other needs some artificial means to make up for his unavoidable absence from the actual scene of debate. The one, in short, belonged to a seeing and hearing, the other belongs to a reading public; the one heard Periklês, Nikias, or Kleôn with his own ears, the other listens to his Cobden, his Disraeli, or his Palmerston only through the agency of paper and printer's ink. The difference between reading in print and reading in manuscript is a wide one; the difference between reading in manuscript and not reading at all is wider still: but the widest difference of all lies between free discussion in any shape and the absence

* [This subject, with one or two kindred ones, has been worked out more fully in the third chapter of my 'Growth of the English Constitution.' See pp. 132-134.]