1921 REVIEWS OF BOOKS 589 preceding centuries, culminating in the study of Aristotle, is perhaps even now not sufficiently recognized. The second part of the book has yet to be surpassed for the lucidity and precision of its expose of the political theory of the later middle ages. Beginning with the philosophical, but hopelessly unpractical imaginations of John of Salisbury — ' all temporary matters John passes by ' (p. 205) — we pass through the extreme hierarchical theory of Augustinus Triumphus to the writers in defence of the secular state : to Peter Dubois recasting the existing assortment of power in Europe with the serenest national complacency ; to Dante attempting in the noblest medieval fashion a harmony of the universe by the exchange of ' one impossible theory for another equally impossible ' (p. 229) ; to Marsilius of Padua, rediscover- ing and reinventing the classical theory of the state, democratic, all- powerful, one and indivisible, subject to a natural law of human societies, and the while broaching novelty after novelty till he seems to anticipate the nineteenth century ; to Ockham, the indefatigable querist, the most unsettling of all philosophers ; to Wycliffe, seeming to reach one hand heartily between the idealist John of Salisbury and the Spiritual Fran- ciscans, and withdrawing the other, a little perhaps stained by contact, from Marsilius of Padua. Dr. Poole's acutest analysis is perhaps reserved for Wycliffe, of whose treatises Be Bominio he has produced model editions, but for its modernity his brilliant abstract of Marsilius, still the best in English, has perhaps the greater interest. He corrects in a note (p. 242) the too sweeping statement in the text, that Marsilius ' exercised little direct influence on the movement of thought ', but perhaps he a little diminishes Marsilius's achievement, making him even more of a visionary doctrinaire than he was, when he says (p. 247) that ' none of the opponents of the papal claims . . . make any attempt to adjust their schemes to the political or legal framework of their own country '. Yet Marsilius's country was first the commune of Padua, and secondly the Italicum regnum which is always in his thoughts, and whose lacerated state prompts his Befensor as it did Machiavelli's Prince. It is this, for one thing, which made Marsilius so much less fanciful and more fruitful in his purely political theory than his contemporaries : that he has in his eye, and attempts to justify and improve by Aristotelian reasoning, the Italian commune as it worked in his own day by natural growth and business-like con- trivance without the real intervention of any theory whatever. Marsilius does not really care about the empire (pp. 234-5, 244), but he does about the working of the secular state as seen in an Italian commune. The audience he addressed and the generalized method of his day have obscured this practical foundation of iiis state-theory. To mention only one or two points : we have the arengo or mass-assembly as the ultimate legislator, the supreme elected executive (pars principans), whether one man (e. g. podesta) or a committee like the Florentine priors. The very process of legislation he recommends (Bid. i, cap. 13, pt. 8) is that of a Florentine revision of statutes. It was his native Padua which, not unlike other communes, found the ecclesiastics' claim to be exempt from civic tribunals and taxation so intolerable that in 1282 she even denied them the protection of the law to which they would not submit. Marsilius's
