of the Guelph faction. She had been inflamed and pacified through continual paroxysms of civil quarrel during the decline of Charles's power; but, throughout, the influence of the nobles declines, by reason of their own folly and insolence; while the people, though with no small degree of folly and insolence on their own side, keep hold of their main idea of justice. In the meantime, similar assertions of law against violence, and the nobility of useful occupation, as compared with that of idle rapine, took place in Bologna, Siena, and even at Rome, where Bologna sends her senator, Branca Leone, (short for Branca-di-Leone, Lion's Grip,) whose inflexible and rightly guarded reign of terror to all evil and thievish persons, noble or other, is one of the few passages of history during the middle ages, in which the real power of civic virtue may be seen exercised without warping by party spirit, or weakness of vanity or fear.
266. And at last, led by a noble, Giano della Bella, the people of Florence write and establish their final condemnation of noblesse living by rapine, those 'Ordinamenti della Giustizia,' which practically excluded all idle persons from government, and determined that the priors, or
