Opere Inedite di Francesco Guicciardini Illustrate da Giuseppe Canestrini, e Publicate per cura dei Conti Piero e Luigi Guicciardini. Volume Primo, Ricordi Politici e Civili.-Volume Decimo, Ricordi di Famiglia, Ricordi Autobiografici. Firenze, 1857-1867.1 THE family and autobiographical Ricordi' of Guicciardini vividly reproduce in some of its last living examples, at the opening of the modern era, that singular type of merchant statesmanship which formed so important and predominant an element in mediæval Italian republican politics. They afford us the same sort of vivid conception of that type as the Lives of the Norths' do of the race of political lawyers and men of business who rose into eminence in the perturbed politics of the last Stuart reigns in England. The alternately conflicting and mingling aristocratical and commercial elements in Italian public life had produced between them something of the like sort of mixed character as they afterwards did in England. Even in the iron age of the Sforzas and Borgias, eminently respectable private and public characters were often the growth of the mingled influences which affected public life, so long as public life From the Quarterly Review, October 1871. 1 B was not yet stamped out in Italy. What was much more rare was anything approaching the heroic type in Italian public men. That type is rare indeed in all ages, but in the age and country of Machiavelli and Guicciardini, as in the succeeding age of Lord Keeper Guilford and Sir Dudley North in England, all aspirations after it, as well as all approach to it, seemed to have in a manner ceased. The sixteenth century in Italy was an age of transition from spirited if ill-organised autonomy to a dull level of spiritual and secular despotism. It presents the spectacle of a country foremost in the opening of the march of modern civilisation suddenly finding itself the helpless object of rival rapacity to ruder but stronger states; its leading men, whose minds and characters had been formed in the liberal school of world-wide commerce and uncontrolled self-government, suddenly compelled to transfer their political activity, if they were still bent on exerting it, from the councils of their country to the courts and cabinets of overbearing native or foreign princes. The habit of writing Ricordi '-for which the English word 'Records' is not an exact equivalent-of noting down, not for immediate nor even ultimate publication, whatever, from day to day, seemed noteworthy in private or public, domestic or foreign transactions, was practised more methodically and systematically by the Italian public men of the fourteenth, fifteenth, and the first half of the sixteenth century, than perhaps it has been by those of any other age or country. It was a habit which came, as it were, naturally to those merchant-statesmen. These so-called 'Ricordi' had no more literary design or pretension about them than any of the other business entries in their day-books or ledgers, amongst which, indeed, they were very commonly interspersed and intercalated, being made, like the rest, for use and not for show, and forming, in fact, as observed by the editor of the volumes before us, a civil and domestic autobiographic chronicle, often begemmed with moral maxims and sentences, and Scripture texts. Some of these 'Ricordi,' including those of Lorenzo the Magnificent, and |