Identifier: historianshistor09will (find matches)
Title: The historians' history of the world; a comprehensive narrative of the rise and development of nations as recorded by over two thousand of the great writers of all ages:
Year: 1904 (1900s)
Authors: Williams, Henry Smith, 1863-1943
Subjects: World history
Publisher: New York : The Outlook Company (etc.,etc.)
Contributing Library: University of California Libraries
Digitizing Sponsor: Internet Archive

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om or power already enjoyed, and in some cases the hope ofrecovering them, gave a higher energy to their individuality. Among thesemen of involuntary leisure we find, for instance, an Agnolo Pandolfini (died144li), whose work on domestic economy is the first complete programme ofdeveloped private life. His estimate of the duties of the individual as againstthe dangers and thanklessness of public life is in its way a true monumentof the age. Banishment, too, has this effect above all, that it either wears the exile outor tlivelops whatever is greatest in him. In all our more populous cities,says Giovanni Pontano, we see a crowd of people who have left their homes 1 Franco Sacchetti, in his Capitolo (Rime, publ. dal Poggiali, p. 56), enumerates about 1390the names of over a hundred distinguished people in the ruling parties who had died within hismemory. However many mediocrities there may have been among them, the list is still remark-able as evidence of the awakening of individuality.
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DANTE THE VANGUARD OF THE RENAISSANCE 181 of their own free will; but a man takes his virtues with him wherever he goes." And, in fact, they were by no means only men who had been actually exiled, but thousands left their native place voluntarily, because they found its political or economical condition intolerable. The Florentine emigrants at Ferrara and the Lucchese in Venice formed whole colonies by themselves.
The cosmopolitanism which grew up in the most gifted circles is in itself a high stage of individualism. Dante, as we have already said, finds a new home in the language and culture of Italy, but goes beyond even this in the words, "My country is the whole world." And when his recall to Florence was offered him on unworthy conditions, he wrote back: "Can I not everywhere behold the light of the sun and the stars, everywhere meditate on the noblest truths, without appearing ingloriously and shamefully before the city and the people? Even my bread will not fail me." The artists exult no less defiantly in their freedom from the constraints of fixed residence.

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