tion in the esteem of the wise and good. Girolamo Savonarola was the apostle and martyr of truth in an age and land, in which truth was more contemptuously trodden under foot than in most periods of the Christian Church.

During the whole of the obscure period of four years, during which we dimly trace the movements of Savonarola in the cities of Lombardy, before his second and final establishment in Florence, his fame was becoming more acknowledged not only as the preacher, or, it may be, the prophet, but as a man of profound thought, clear and subtle solution of theological difficulties, wise counsel, and grave authority. At a council of his order holden in Reggio, he displayed those qualities so entirely opposite to the accomplishment of a passionate and fanatic preacher. It is said that the famous Pico di Mirandola, the uncle of the prophet's future disciple and historian, who was present at the council, was so impressed with his transcendant abilities, as to speak strongly in his favour to his friend Lorenzo de' Medici. Yet there seems no evidence that Savonarola, when he settled in Florence more than three years afterwards, received any invitation from Lorenzo; it was almost an accidental arrangement of his superior which sent him again, as the humble reader, to the convent of St. Mark. Neither did the Order, nor did Savonarola himself, nor did Lorenzo, on the news of his arrival, foresee that in that lowly friar, who travelled on foot, and almost sunk under fatigue at the village of Pianora, eight miles from Bologna, Florence was to behold the restorer of her liberties, the ruler of her popular mind, the spiritual lord who should hold theocratical sway over her for several years in the name of God and of Christ. Later legend embellishes his journey by a celestial companion, who attended him to his inn, fed him with refreshing meat and wine, and guarded him to the gate of S. Gallo.

Lorenzo the Magnificent had now been for many years the Lord of Florence. His age has been called the Augustan age of Italian letters (strangely enough in the native land of Dante, Ariosto, and Tasso), but he resembled Augustus in more than his patronage of poets and philosophers,-in the skill with which, like his grandfather Cosmo, he disguised his aristocracy under republican forms. On his contested character we must not enter; nor inquire how far he compensated to Florence, for the loss of her turbulent, it must be acknowledged, her precarious, liberties, by peace, by wealth, by splendour, by the cultivation of arts and of letters; by making her the centre and the source of the new civilization of the world.

Since the failure of the Pazzi conspiracy, Lorenzo had maintained his temperate but undisputed sway in Florence.

His

only

only danger was from without, and this he had averted by his wisdom and courage, by his bold visit to the court of his mortal enemy, the King of Naples; he had brought back peace to emperilled Florence, security to his own government. But the Pazzi conspiracy is so fearfully illustrative of the state of Italian, of Papal morals, at the time when Savonarola began his career, that it must not be altogether passed by. The object of that conspiracy was not the freedom of Florence, though it was to overthrow the power of the Medici. It was the substitution of the rule of another faction and family, through the authority of the Pazzi. The revolution was deliberately planned at Rome in the Papal counsels; the Pope's nephew was the prime mover, the leading agent an archbishop, its means foul murder. The place of that murder was the great church of Florence, the time of that murder the celebration of the Mass, the signal for that murder the elevation of the Host, the presentation to the adoring people (as all believed) of the God of mercy and of love. Lorenzo saw the dagger driven home to the heart of his brother Giuliano; but escaped himself by a strange accident. The ruffian to whom his death was assigned, a man whose hands were dyed with a hundred murders, and who was inured to the death-shriek of innocent men, scrupled at his task; he would not murder in a church! A priest was easily found with none of those compunctious visitings; but the priest's hand was feeble and unpractised, and Lorenzo came off with a slight wound. The Pope's complicity is beyond all doubt.

A confession of one of the ruffians was published, from which it appeared that the Pope had repeatedly declared against bloodshed, as unbecoming his office; but after this special protest, he had given these merciless men, who all the while declared that without blood their plot must fail, his full sanction. Nor was this all. The Bull of Sixtus IV. (we presume that it bore the awful prelude, 'in sempiternam memoriam,' for the eternal memory of man), his Bull of excommunication against the Florentines for their vengeance against the murderers, still glares in the eyes of posterity. Of the murder in the church, of the murder at the elevation of the Host, there is not one word of abhorrence. It is treated as a mere ordinary fray between two Florentine factions; but on the hanging the archbishop of Pisa, the murderer, taken in the fact, of whose guilt it was impossible to entertain the shadow of a doubt; on his execution the Bull assumes all its denunciatory terrors: it is the most awful sacrilege, a crime deserving the most dreadful torments here and hereafter. And Sixtus IV., against whose character there were other most foul charges, it may be calumnies, but charges published

at

at the time at Rome, and throughout Italy; Sixtus, who almost began that system of princely nepotism, the foundation not of estates but of principalities for his needy, rapacious, and too often profligate relatives, was the head of the Christian world, when the holy Savonarola cast his eyes abroad upon that Church, in which he hoped to find the spirit, the sanctity of the Lord and his apostles. The successor of Sixtus IV. was Innocent VIII. (Cibo). The poetical pasquinades of the day stigmatized this Pope as the father of sixteen bastards; charity and truth brought the number down to seven; two only survived to benefit by their father's elevation; his defenders therefore have asserted that there were but two. Innocent was the first Pope who cared not to disguise his parental relation under the specious name of nepotism. But the new Pope was no longer hostile, he was in close alliance with Florence and the House of Medici; his son was married to a daughter of Lorenzo. In a well-known letter Lorenzo (so much had the advancement of the Pope's kindred become a matter of course) gently reproaches Innocent with the timid reserve with which he had hitherto provided for his own flesh and blood. Innocent was to be succeeded, almost before Savonarola had begun his more famous career, by Alexander VI., a Pope, from whom papal zeal shrinks, and has hardly ventured on the forlorn hope of apology. In truth this period, even when compared with that at the close of the tenth century, and the worst times in Avignon, and during the schism, is the darkest in · Papal history. The few brighter years after the Council of Constance, of Martin V., of Nicolas V., and in spite of the confessions of his youth, and his flagrant tergiversations, of Pius II., had raised the pontificate to some part at least of its old awe and respect. Towards the close of the fifteenth century the Popes had become Italian princes; their objects were those of the Viscontis or Sforzas of Milan: it might seem their sole aim to found principalities in their houses; their means were the same,-intrigue, treachery, violence and rapacity. Such was the state of the Papacy when the Dominican, now arising to the zenith of his fame, and master of an eloquence, unheard for centuries in the pulpits of Italy; with a character altogether blameless, and as yet unsuspected, probably unconscious, of political designs; with the sole purpose of promoting the religion of the people, took up his abode in the convent of St. Mark. The Dominican convent of St. Mark had been rebuilt by the munificent piety of

*It appears from Dr. Madden that a French writer has undertaken this foolish task, but we must acknowledge that this ultramontane school, the school of Audin and Rohrbacher, as to historical value, is so far below contempt, that it hardly touches our curiosity: paradox must be ingenious and plausible even to amuse.

Cosmo

Cosmo de' Medici. In three years he is said by P. Marchese to have spent 36,000 gold florins upon it. Cosmo had delighted to visit within its walls the holy Antonino, afterwards archbishop of Florence, and in good time a saint. Cosmo's grandson, Lorenzo, maintained the hereditary respect of his house for the convent of St. Mark. On the walls were now, fresh in all their saintly beauty, the frescoes of Fra Angelico, who in its cells had prayed and painted, painted and prayed; his prayers no doubt crowded with themes of the holy images which he painted, while his paintings, as it were, embodied prayer. St. Mark is perpetually visited in the present day by those who, gazing with admiration on the works of Fra Angelico, forget that its cloisters were trod by the no less holy, but less peaceful, feet of Fra Girolamo. But with what rapture must the Preacher have gazed on the congenial paintings of Fra Angelico !*

From this time Savonarola is to a certain degree his own biographer: the successive volumes of his sermons, from Advent, 1491,† to Lent, 1498 (the year of his death) display the gradual development of his eloquence, his influence, and his aims, till he rises to his height, the legislator, and ruler of Florence. +

He began with the humble office of Reader, that is, the Instructor of the novices, perhaps of the tertiaries, the lay members, of the Order. The sphere of his first efforts was a close hall, of moderate dimensions. The whole body of friars within the convent, and pious hearers from without, crowded the narrow room; he descended into the garden of the convent, and, under the damask rosebushes, or in the porch of a chapel, continued his pious instructions. There was something still of want of freedom in his gestures, something harsh in his intonation, which offended the fastidious eyes and ears of the Florentines. § But these defects fell away, or were lost in his deep earnestness, and kindling fire. There was a general demand that, from the lowly chair of the teacher, he should mount the authoritative pulpit. Savonarola at first hesitated to accept the offer of his Superior, the Prior of St. Mark. His biographers assert (legend now begins to speak) that, when he yielded, he said, 'To-morrow I shall begin to preach, and I shall preach for eight years.' The Apoca

*The letter-press of the beautiful engravings from these frescoes is by the Padre Marchese.

These two courses were published at Prato (1846) in a volume intended as the commencement of a complete collection of his works. This design has, we regret to find, been abandoned.

Perrens Recherches Supplémentaires,' tom. ii. p. 457.

§ Perrens, p. 42, with the quotation from the Magliabecchian Library, and from his book 'De Veritate Prophetica.'

lypse

lypse was again his inspiring theme. On the 1st of August (1491), on a Sunday,

'I began publicly to expound the Revelations in our church of St. Mark. During the course of the year, I continued to develope to the Florentines these three propositions: "That the Church would be renewed in our time." "Before that renovation, God would strike all Italy with a fearful chastisement." "That these things would happen shortly." I laboured to demonstrate these three points to my hearers, and to persuade them by probable arguments, by allegories drawn from the Sacred Scriptures, by other similitudes and parables drawn from what was going on in the Church. I insisted on reasons of this kind; and I dissembled the knowledge which God gave me of these things in other ways, because men's spirits appeared to me not yet in a state fit to comprehend such mysteries.'

In all the early sermons, Savonarola is as yet neither tribune nor prophet; but he is a preacher such as perhaps Italy had never before heard. He himself describes perpetually, what deadened the force of all Italian preaching-subtle logical distinctions, profane and idle similitudes, illustrations from heathen poets, from Dante or Petrarch; he compares the preachers of his day to the singers and mourners in the house of the ruler of the synagogue, whose mournful music made the soul weep, but could not raise the dead. Savonarola might now seem to have studied hardly more than one book, and that the Book of Books: he is said to have learnt the Bible by heart. But it was that book, read by an imagination which opened out the biblical language with a boldness and luxuriance, certainly as yet untried, and perhaps hardly surpassed in later days every image, every allegory, every parable, every figure has not one but a thousand meanings,-meanings, each of the same authority with its plainest and most literal significance,-meanings heaped one upon another with prodigal profusion; and that not in wanton ingenuity, but with a vehemence and fervour which enforce the belief that the preacher had the fullest confidence in every one of his wildest interpretations. There is still enough of the Peripatetic philosophy of his master, S. Thomas Aquinas, to show that it is not for want, but from disdain, of erudition, that he rests his teaching on the word of God, and on that alone. At the same time he retains the most humble deference for the doctrines of the Church on all theological questions, and has full faith in the poetic mythology of the middle ages, in the Virgin, and in the Saints.

From this time all Florence crowded to the preacher. The narrow church of St. Mark was too small. He was summoned to the cathedral; and here men climbed the walls and swarmed

on