productions alone would have given Florence an immortal name in Art history.  Yet he preserved a perfect simplicity of equipage and apparel.  In this regard, faithful to the traditions of the republic, which his family had really changed from a democracy to a ploutarchy, he had the good taste to scorn the vulgar pomp of kings,—­“the horses led, and grooms besmeared with gold,”—­all the theatrical paraphernalia and plebeian tinsel “which dazzle the crowd and set them all agape”; but his expenditures were those of an intellectual and accomplished oligarch.  He was worthy, in many respects, to be the chief of those haughty merchants and manufacturers, who wielded more power, through the length of their purses and the cultivation of their brains, than did all the contemporaneous and illiterate barons of the rest of Christendom, by dint of castle-storming and cattle-stealing.

In an age when other nobles were proud of being unable to write their own names, or to read them when others wrote them, the great princes and citizens of Florence protected and cultivated art, science, and letters.  Every citizen received a liberal education.  Poets and philosophers sat in the councils of the republic.  Philosophy, metaphysics, and the restoration of ancient learning occupied the minds and diminished the revenues of its greater and inferior burghers.  In this respect, the Medici, and their abetters of the fifteenth century, discharged a portion of the debt which they had incurred to humanity.  They robbed Italy of her freedom, but they gave her back the philosophy of Plato.  They reduced the generality of Florentine citizens, who were once omnipotent, to a nullity; but they had at least, the sense to cherish Donatello and Ghiberti, Brunelleschi and Gozzoli, Ficino and Politian.

It is singular, too, with what comparatively small means the Medici were enabled to do such great things.  Cosmo, unquestionably the greatest and most successful citizen that ever lived,—­for he almost rivalled Pericles in position, if not in talent, while he surpassed him in good fortune,—­was, during his lifetime, the virtual sovereign of the most enlightened and wealthy and powerful republic that had existed in modern times.  He built the church of San Marco, the church of San Lorenzo, the cloister of San Verdiano.  On the hill of Fiesole he erected a church and a convent.  At Jerusalem he built a church and a hospital for pilgrims.  All this was for religion, the republic, and the world.  For himself he constructed four splendid villas, at Careggi, Fiesole, Caffaggiolo, and Trebbio, and in the city the magnificent palace in the Via Larga, now called the Riccardi.