might easily come to be confounded. Thus the Marquesses of Este became Lords of Modena and Ferrara, and they were often spoken of as Marquesses of the latter city before they had gained any formal right to the title. In any case, the position of a feudal prince, independent in fact, though nominally holding of a superior lord, was one perfectly familiar both to the ruler and to his subjects, and it was one to which an easy process could raise him. It only needed the outlay of some small part of what he levied on his countrymen to buy from the Pope or the Emperor a diploma changing the fallen commonwealth into a duchy or marquisate to be held by himself and his heirs for ever. Such a document at once changed, legally at least, his usurped and precarious power into an acknowledged and lawful sovereignty, handed on according to a definite law of succession, and subject to all the accidents of a feudal lordship. But such a process often carried with it the seeds of its own destruction. When Gian-Galeazzo bought the investiture of a Duke of the Empire from the careless Wenceslaus, he paved the way for all the wars which devastated his duchy, and for the final loss of its independence. When Borso of Este became a Papal vassal for his new Duchy of Ferrara, he took the first step towards its ultimate absorption into the immediate domain of the Roman See.

This phænomenon of Tyrants is one which seems to be peculiar to Greece and Italy among the various systems of town-autonomy. In Switzerland and the Netherlands, a demagogue* now and then won an influence which practically made him the temporary sovereign of his own city. But no such demagogue ever founded a permanent tyranny; much less did he ever change his position into an acknowledged sovereignty. Again, between Greece and Italy we may discern some chronological differences. In the Greek colonies the Tyrant was a phænomenon to be found in all ages, and his position seems to have differed less than elsewhere from lawful kingship. Not only the laureate

* [I do not use the word contemptuously dŋuaywyós—a name given to Periklês himself-is surely the highest title that man can bear.]

Pindar, but Herodotus himself does not scruple to apply the title of Bariλeús to various Sicilian and Italian rulers.* In the Macedonian times, when Greece had become familiar with kingship, the title was of course more freely assumed. But in Greece itself tyranny was a phænomenon confined almost wholly to two periods. There were the demagogue-Tyrants of the early days of the republics, partizan chiefs who commonly ruled with the good-will of at least a portion of the people. There were the military Tyrants of a later time, who ruled by sheer violence at the head of bands of mercenaries, and who were practically mere

* [On looking more narrowly into this matter, I doubt whether Herodotus, speaking in his own person, ever does give the title of Baσıλeús to any one who was strictly rúpavvos. I add an extract from an Essay of mine which deals too much with details to be reprinted in full. (Herodotus and his Commentators,' National Review, October 1862, p. 300.)

'Nothing is more clearly marked in Greek political languages than the difference between King and Tyrant, βασιλεύς and τύραννος. The βασιλεύς, we need hardly say, is the lawful King, the hereditary or elective prince of a state whose constitution is monarchic. It is applicable alike to a good King and to a bad one, to the despotic empire of Persia and to the almost nominal royalty of Lacedæmon; but it always implies that kingship is the recognized government of the country. The Túpavvos, on the other hand, is the ruler who obtains kingly power in a republic, and whose government therefore, whether good or bad in itself, is unlawful in its origin. In the same way it is applicable to the lawful King who seizes on a degree of power which the law does not give him; it is therefore applied, by their respective enemies, to Pheidôn of Argos and to the last Kleomenês of Sparta. It is clear then that Baoλeús is a title of respect, while Túpavvos implies more or less of contempt or hatred. The Tyrant would wish to be called Baσiλeús, and would be so called by his flatterers, but by nobody else. But in republican language, especially in days when lawful Kings hardly existed in Greece itself, lawful kingship might often be spoken of as tyranny. Now all these distinctions are carefully attended to by Herodotus; to translate the words Baoiλeús and Túpavvos as if Herodotus used them indiscriminately is utterly to misrepresent the author. Herodotus clearly observes the distinction. He applies the word Baσiλeús to foreign Kings, and to the princes of those Greek states where royalty had never been abolished. He gives us Kings of Kyrênê, Kings of Cyprus, Kings of Sparta, a King of Thessaly,—meaning doubtless the Tagos (v. 63); but never, when speaking in his own person, does he give us Kings of Athens or Corinth. When therefore we find a King of Zanklê (vi. 2, 3) and a King of the Tarentines (iii. 136) we may fairly infer that at Zanklê and Tarentum kingly government had not gone out of use up to the time of Herodotus. The address & Baσiλeú, at the beginning of the angry speech of the Athenian envoys (vii. 161), may well be sarcastic."]

Macedonian viceroys. Neither class were ever acknowledged as Kings, but the later class were still further from such acknowledgement than the earlier. Between the two periods comes the real republican period, from Kleisthenês to Dêmosthenês, during which Tyrants are but seldom heard of, and scarcely ever in the most illustrious cities. But in Italy, the phænomenon of tyranny did not begin at all till the republican spirit had begun to decay, and, as we have seen, it gradually changed into what was looked upon as legitimate sovereignty.

Lastly, as the Greek nation was the first which developed for itself anything worthy of the name of civilization, Greece and the Greek colonies naturally formed the whole extent of their own civilized world. Other nations were simply outside Barbarians. In the best days of Greece the interference of a foreign power in her internal quarrels would have seemed as if the sovereign of Morocco or China should claim the presidency of a modern European congress. In later times indeed Sparta and Thebes and Athens, each in turn, found it convenient to contract political alliances with the Great King at Ekbatana, or with their more dangerous neighbour at Pella. But the Mede always remained a purely external enemy or a purely external paymaster; the Macedonian had himself to become a Greek before his turn came to be the dominant power of Greece. But in medieval Italy the case was widely different. She affected indeed to apply the name Barbarian to all nations beyond her mountain-bulwark. Nor did the assumption want some show of justification in her palpable pre-eminence in wealth, in refinement, in literature, in many branches of art, above all in political knowledge and progress. But, notwithstanding this, it was impossible to place mediæval Italy so far above contemporary France or Spain or Germany, as ancient Greece stood above the rest of her contemporary world. All the states of Western Christendom were fragments of a single Empire, whose laws and language and general civilization had left traces

among them all. A common religion too united them against the paynim of Cordova or Bagdad, too often against the schismatic who filled the throne of Constantine. Italy for ages saw the lawful successor of her Kings and Cæsars in a Barbarian of the race most alien to her feelings and language. Most of her highest nobility drew their origin from the same foreign stock. No wonder then if nations less alien to her tongue and manners played a part in her internal politics which differed widely from any interference of Barbarians in the affairs of Greece. Italian parties ranged themselves under the German watchwords of Guelf and Ghibelin, and fought under the standards of Angevin, Provençal, and Aragonese invaders. Florence looked to France-lily to lily-as her natural ally and her chosen protector. Sicily sought for her deliverer from French oppression in the rival power of a Spanish King. French and Spanish princes had been so often welcomed into Italy, they had so often filled Italian thrones and guided Italian politics, that men perhaps hardly understood the change or foresaw the consequences, when for the first time a King of France entered Italy in arms as the claimant of an Italian kingdom. Gradually, but only gradually, the strife which had once been a mere disputed succession between an Angevin and an Aragonese pretender grew into a strife between the mightiest potentates of the West for the mastery of Italy and of Europe.

The coronation of Charles the Fifth ends the history of independent Italy. It ends also the history of the Western Empire. No Roman Emperor ever again came down into Italy to claim the golden crown at the hands of the Roman Pontiff. Moreover, since the days of Justinian, no Roman Emperor had ever held the same unbounded sway through the whole length of the Italian peninsula. That sway he indeed handed on to his successors, not indeed to his successors in the shadowy majesty of the Empire, but to those who wielded the more real might of Spain and the

E

Indies. If in later times his power in Italy came back to German princes who still bore the Imperial title, it came back to them, not as chiefs of a Roman or even a German Empire, but as those who wielded the power of the hereditary states of the Austrian House. The real history alike of the Empire and of the commonwealths ends with the fall of Florence and the pageant of Bologna. The formal close of Italian independence may indeed be put off till the last conquest of Sienna some twenty years later. One Italian state indeed had yet to run a course of glory, but it was hardly in the character of an Italian state. Venice still continued her career as the withstander, sometimes the conqueror, of the infidel. Bragadino had yet to die in torments -the penalty of trusting to an Ottoman capitulation. The fruitless laurels of Lepanto were yet to be won, and Morosini had yet to drive out the Barbarian from the plains of Argos and the Akropolis of Corinth. Genoa still kept her republican forms, and for one moment she showed the true republican spirit. Her patrician rulers had sunk in slumber; but the people of the Proud City had still, hardly a century back, strength left for a rising which drove forth the Austrian from her gates. But as a whole, Italy was dead. We have ourselves seen her renewed struggles for life; we have again seen her crushed down under the yoke of the brother tyrants of Austria and France. For eight years she has crouched in voiceless and seemingly hopeless bondage. That she has fallen for ever we will not willingly believe. But in what form shall she rise again? Her town-autonomy can never be restored in an age of Emperors and standing armies. Yet no lover of Italy could bear to see Milan and Venice and Florence and the Eternal City itself sink into provincial dependencies of the Savoyard. The other and more fortunate home of freedom supplies the key. If right and freedom should ever win back their own, the course of Aratos and Washington, of Fürst and Stauffacher and Melchthal,* must be the guiding star of the liberators

* [I have since learned that the 'Three Men' are mythical; but the lesson of Swiss history is none the less useful.]