pessimism, he had an ideal, and he tells us plainly what it was:
"I desire to see three things before my death—but I doubt I may live long enough without seeing any of them—a well-ordered republican mode of life in our own city, the deliverance of Italy from all barbarians, and the world freed from the tyranny of these execrable priests."
The mutability of the world might almost seem to justify Guicciardini's hand-to-mouth method of getting through it. We have seen Petrarch two centuries earlier calling for the Pope's return to Rome as the panacea for all the ills of Italy. Guicciardini would have sided with him in that age; in his own the same genius of liberty which spoke by Petrarch's mouth to demand the Pope's restoration speaks by his to demand the Pope's expulsion. It was not given to him to see the great value in evil times of the temporal power—in good times monstrous—as an asylum for what little of independence could still subsist in Italy, and a testimony, however feeble, to a moral and spiritual unity destined to develop into a national unity. But against the Papal sway on its own merits, apart from the accidental circumstances of the time, Guicciardini and Machiavelli prophesy like the two witnesses of the Apocalypse.
