Cosimo, besides those, literary tastes which led him to gather around him the greatest thinkers, philosophers, and poets of his day, also took a strong interest in architecture, and had a practical knowledge of art; it is to him that we owe San Lorenzo, the church and convent of St. Mark, the monastery of San Verdiana, the monastery of San Gerolamo upon the heights of Fiesole, where the Gerolamite hermits assembled, until it was suppressed by Clement IX., and the abbey of San Bartolomeo and San Romolo for the canons of the Lateran. At Mugello, his favorite residence until Careggi was built, he reconstructed from its very foundations the convent of Bosco a Prati, and in each of these religious houses he took care that there was a library of MSS. Countless was the number of private chapels built at his expense, such as the Noviziato at Santa Croce ; and those in the convent of Agnoli belonging to the Camalduli Fathers ; in the church of the Servi ; and that of San Miniato al -Monte. When to these are added the gift of all the ornaments, furniture, and utensils necessary for Celebrating public worship, it will be seen what immense wealth the house of Medici must have possessed.

Giovanni himself lived in great state, but his son outdid him in splendor. San Tommasso in Mercato, the first residence of the Medici, was abandoned for the splendid palace in the Via Larga. During his lifetime he had four summer residences in the neighborhood of Florence : Careggi, which still exists, Fiesole, Cafaggiuolo, and Trebbio. He kept up the state of a prince rather than of a private individual, and his charities were far reaching, for he founded an asylum at Jerusalem for needy pilgrims, and employed his leisure time while exiled at Venice in founding a library of MSS. in the monastery of the canons of San Giorgio.

All the subsequent doings, of the Medici are well known, and I have had in my hand the account-books of the expenses of all these buildings; these historic documents, which are now of great value, being preserved in the State archives of Florence. They are called the "Libro di Ragione," and it was in them that the steward kept a debtor and creditor account of all that he paid and received. During the lifetime of Giovanni alone the expenditure under this head amounted to five hundred thousand gold crowns, and even this enormous sum did not make any appreciable difference in the ever-growing fortune of the house. It will, of course, be well understood that Giovanni himself, the founder of the house, did not amass all this wealth, his inheritance from his father being a very considerable one; but his business as a money-changer, carried on upon an immense scale, had increased it very much. As far back as the fourteenth century the Medici had sixteen counting-houses in different cities, of Europe, and they had also contracted for the taxes and excise of the Republic, so that a very large profit accrued from all these transactions, conducted with a scrupulous honesty which had established their credit upon very solid foundations. Moreover, they carried on a banking business, and it was to these operations not always very profitable, because they sometimes lent money to those of their fellow-citizens who could not pay the interest, or even what they had borrowed that they owed their immense popularity. This generosity may, however, not have been wholly disinterested, and several contemporary writers, Varchi among them, have denounced their liberality as being all a sham, and have said that Giovanni founded the influence of his family upon corruption, and bought his way to supreme power.

Be this as it may, Giovanni and his two sons became bankers to kings, and lent money to sovereigns who sought to possess themselves of dominion. Edward IV always said that it was thanks to them that he wore the crown of England.

For such a man as Cosimo, with children worthy of himself --animated by a liberal and generous spirit, a warm-hearted and intelligent patron of arts, science, and letters, circumspect and daring by turn, as occasion requires there need be no limit to success. He possessed, moreover, that most powerful of all engines for travelling along the road to power boundless wealth. The name of Medici, like that of M cenas, became in future ages the synonym for an enlightened patron of literature; and if this family did not absolutely initiate the extraordinary movement which, starting from Florence, spread throughout Italy, they supported it with such ardor and profound conviction that they gave their name to the century, so that one now speaks of the " age of the Medici" as of the age of Pericles."

Cosimo, in his position, might, had he so desired, have espoused some Italian princess, or even the daughter of a sovereign house; but he had the tact to marry a Florentine, the daughter of Count Bardi, he adopted the same course with his children, marrying his eldest son Piero to Lucrezia Tornabuoni, and his other son, Giovanni, to Cornelia degli Alessandri. His brother Lorenzo died comparatively young, having without having occupied a very prominent place in the State; but as he left a son, Piero Francisco de' Medici, the family divided into two branches the elder, of which Cosimo the Father of his Country was the head, and the younger, issuing from Lorenzo, second son of Giovanni Averardo di Bicci.

It was Cosimo who built the Medici Palace, now called the Riccardi Palace, as a family residence. Machiavelli has described his death in the villa at Careggi, and has left a flattering portrait which brings out the principal traits in his character. After enumerating his endowments, his undertakings, and splendor of life, he praises him for having always preserved, both in public and private, so simple a demeanor that he might easily have been mistaken for the humblest of his fellow-citizens. He led for the most part a very laborious life, but during his latter years allowed himself some mental relaxation, and leaving the management of his business to the Tornabuoni, the Benci, the Portinari, and the Sassetti, whose fortunes he had made, surrounded himself with men of letters, and artists. He was the personal friend of Donatello and Michelozzo, of Marcilio Ficino, of Cristofero Landino, of Giovanni Cavalcanti, of Bartolomeo and Filippo Valori, of Baccio Ugolini, of Giovanni, Pico, and of Leone Battista Alberti.

He had not, it may be admitted, the high intellectual culture of Lorenzo the Magnificent but it was enough for a Medici to be, as regards comprehension and enthusiasm, on a level with those who produce and create. Moreover there are extant letters of Cosimo the Elder which show that he was an ardent student. In one of these he writes to Marcilio Ficino "I came to Careggi yesterday as much for the purpose of improving my land as of benefiting myself. Come to see me as soon as you possibly can, and do not forget to bring with you divine Plato's treatise on The Sovereign Good.' You ought ere this to have translated it into Latin. There is no research to which I would devote myself more zealously than to that of truth. Come, then, and bring with you the Orphean lyre,."

This is not the only proof of his enthusiasm for literature. In the shrubberies and woods of Careggi he spent the hottest hours of the day in learned discussion with the great writers and philosophers whose names we have quoted. A profound admirer of Gemistas Plethon, the Greek philosopher who upheld the doctrines of Plato, and whose tomb I discovered at Rimini, Cosimo determined to found a Platonician school, and he placed at the head of it Marcilio Ficino, a man of profound intellect, a great thinker, a great writer, and a Christian philosopher, who declared that the proofs of the Divinity were to be found among the pagans, as the Fathers of the Church in his day were not sound. Marcilio was the son of Cosimo's physician ; and beneath the trees of Careggi, and in the rooms of that summer residence, there assembled an areopagus composed of the humanists who paved the way for the literary Renaissance in Italy.

The death of Cosimo the Elder was very touching. He had been unhappy in his private life, for Giovanni, the son whom he liked best, had died young, and Piero, nicknamed Gottoso so deformed and debilitated was he by gout became too infirm to bear the burden of public affairs. Cosimo, therefore, found his sole consolation in literature. Still, he lived to see his grandson Lorenzo, the son of Piero, grow up, and at the age of sixteen this lad showed signs of the ability which made him the, greatest man of his day. Cosimo, however, never got over the death of Giovanni, and as he was being carried one day in his chair through the magnificent rooms of the Riccardi Palace he was heard to murmur, "Too large a house for so small a family." Cosimo died on the 1st of August, 1464, at Careggi, just outside Florence, and he was buried in the basilica of San Lorenzo, at the foot of a marble column. The traveller who visits the church and pauses before the high altar will be standing upon a circle of inlaid marble bearing the inscription, "Cosmus Medices-Hic Situs est-Decreto Publico Pater Patriae."