.

lost in the Apocalypse. The Archbishop | perpetual appeals of the people who knew was not before his age in scientific knowl-him so well and had occasion so good to edge; but he instantly published a little trust in his kindness living, should have treatise, explaining as well as he could glided with natural ease and fervour into the nature of the commotions that fright-the Ora pro nobis of a popular litany, ened the ignorant, "according to the doc- when the good Archbishop took his gentrine of Aristotle, and the blessed Al- tle way to heaven, leaving four ducats bertus Magnus." It was poor science behind him, on that May morning. The enough, the historian allows, but yet as world was a terribly unsatisfactory world good as could be had at the time; and in those days, as it is now; and full of the authority of the Archbishop calmed evils more monstrous, more appalling, the minds of the people. The reader will than are the sins of our softer generafind, if he wishes, in the legend of Sant' tion; but at the same time, the gates of Antonino, and in the pictorial story of his heaven were somehow nearer, and those life which may be seen in the lunettes of rude eyes, bloodshot with wars and pasthe cloister of San Marco, a great num- sion, could see the saints so unlike thember of incidents purely miraculous; but selves going in by that dazzling way. Padre Marchese does not enter into these We must turn northward, however, to pious fancies. He finds enough to vindi- find the greatest monk of San Marco, the cate the saintship of his Archbishop in man who has writ himself large upon the the honest and undeniable work for God convent, and even on the city, and who and man which he did in his generation; is one of the greatest of the many great and so indeed do I. There is but one figures that inhabit Florence. Savonarola incident in this noble and simple record was born in Ferrara in September, 1452, in which the good Antonino was a little the grandson of an eminent physician at hard upon nature. The garden attached the court of the Duke, and intended by to the Archbishop's palace was a beauti-his parents to follow the same profession. ful and dainty one, in which former pre- He was one of a large family, not over lates had taken great delight, refreshing rich, it would appear, and is said to have their dignified leisure in its glades. But been the one in whom the hopes of his an Archbishop who takes his exercise in kindred were chiefly placed. He was a the streets, leading a panniered mule diligent student, "working day and night," laden with charities, has less need, per- as we are told by his earliest biographer haps, of trim terraces on which to saun- Burlamacchi, his contemporary and disciter. Archbishop Antonino had the flow-ple, whose simple and touching narrative ers dug up, and planted roots and vege- has all the charm of nearness and personal tables for his poor, in respect to whom affection — and attained great proficiency he was fanatical. One grudges the inno-in "the liberal arts." He was learned in cent flowers; but the old man, I suppose, the learning of his day, and in that phihad a right to his whim like another, and losophy of the schools which held so high bishops in that age were addicted some-a place in the estimation of the world times to less virtuous fancies - ravaging the earth for spoil to enrich their families and to buy marbles for their tomb. It was better on the whole to ravage a garden, however beautiful, in order to feed the starving poor.

studying Aristotle, and afterwards, with devotion, St. Thomas Aquinas. But the young man was not of those who take their leading solely from books, however great. He was deeply thoughtful, looking with eyes of profound and indignant obAntonino died in 1459, gliding peace-servation upon all the ways of man, so fully out of the world "as morning whitened on the 2nd of May," when Girolamo Savonarola, coming into it, was just seven years old, a child in Ferrara. The good Archbishop ordered that all that was found in his palace when he died should be given to the poor. All that could be found was four ducats! so true had he been to his vows of poverty. And thus the greatest dignitary of San Marco passed away, followed out of the world by the tears and blessings of the poor, and the semi-adoration of all the city. It is not difficult to understand how the

vain and melancholy. They were, however, more than vain and melancholy in young Girolamo's day; the softer shades of modern evil were exaggerated in those times into such force of contrast as made the heart of the beholder burn within him. On one side, unbounded luxury, splendour and power; on the other, the deepest misery, helplessness, abandonment — the poor more poor, the rich more brutally indifferent of them than we can understand; and every familiar human crime with which we are acquainted in these latter days set out in rampant breadth of

colour and shameless openness. Italy need of them; but only how to get the was the prey of petty tyrants and wicked most wealth, honour, pleasure, fine robes, priests: Dukes and Popes vying with and prancing horses, and beautiful things, each other which could live most lewdly, and power. Outside the gates on the most lavishly, most cruelly their whole river side, the youth wandered solitary, existence an exploitation of the helpless tears in those great eyes, which were repeople they reigned over, or still more splendenti e di color celeste, his rugged helpless "flock" of which these wolves, features moving, his strong heart beating alas! had got the shepherding. And with that high and noble indignation learning was nought, and philosophy vain, which was the only sign of life amid the in those evil days. What were grammat- national depravity. But in the midst of ical disquisitions, or the subtleties of these deep musings there came a moment, mediæval logic to a young soul burning the historians say, when the music and for virtue and truth, to a young heart the freshness of existence came back to wrung with ineffable pity for suffering the boy's soul, and the gates of the and horror of wrong? So soon as Savonarola began to judge for himself, to feel the stirrings of manhood in his youth, this righteous sorrow took possession of the young man's mind. Some poems composed at this time show how deeply penetrated he was by indignation and disgust for all the evils he saw around him. Seeing," he cries, "the world turned upside down:"

Takes tribute, and the poor to ruin drives.

Those souls shall now be thought most rare
and good

Who most by fraud and force can gain,
Who heaven and Christ disdain,

Whose thoughts on other's harm forever

brood.

earthly paradise opened to him, and all the evil world was veiled with fictitious glamour, by the light which shone out of the eyes of a young Florentine, the daughter of an exiled Strozzi. How long this dream lasted, no one knows; but one of his early biographers informs us that it ended with a scornful rejection of the young Savonarola, on the ground that his family was not sufficiently exalted to mate with that of Strozzi. Here is one of his verses written about the time, which will touch the reader's mind with sympathy for the full heart and forlorn confidence of the rejected lover. One hope still remains to him, he says,

I cannot let it leave me like the rest

That in that other life, the best,
Well will be known which soul most highly

springs,

And which to noblest flight uplifts its wings.

Thus separated from the magic web of human happiness which might have blinded him temporarily, at least, to the evils around him, his darker musings came back with renewed power. He describes to his father in the touching letter This profound appreciation of the evils which intimates his entrance into the round him made the young Girolamo a cloister, the motives which moved him, sad and silent youth. "He talked little" In order that you may take comfort from and kept himself retired and solitary," this explanation, and feel assured that I says Burlamacchi. "He took pleasure," have not acted from a juvenile impulse, adds Padre Marchese, "in solitary places, as some seem to think . . ."

These

in the open fields, or along the green were: "the great misery of the world, banks of the Po, and there wandering, the iniquities of men, so that things sometimes singing, sometimes weeping, have come to such a pass that no one can gave utterance to the strong emotions be found acting righteously. Many times which boiled in his breast." The city a day have I repeated with tears the verse, raged or revelled behind him, its streets running blood or running wine-what mattered? according to the turn of fortune; the doctors babbling in their places, of far-fetched questions, of dead grammatical lore; and no man thinking of truth, of mercy, of judgment, with which the lad's bosom was swelling, or of the

Heu fuge crudeles terras, fuge littus avarum! I could not endure the enormous wickedness of the blinded people of Italy; and the more so because I saw everywhere virtue despised and vice honoured. A greater sorrow I could not have in this world." Alone and solitary among peo

ple who did, and who put up with, all of the monks rather than to go back these evils, with no one to sympathize all day long to "vain questions and docwith his feelings, perhaps even scoffed at trines of Aristotle," in which respect, he for his exaggerated views, he endured as said, there was little difference between long as it was possible; while he was si- the frati and ordinary men. But preslent, his heart burned. Disgusted with ently his mind changed as the lassitude the world, disappointed in his personal which succeeds an important step hopes, weary of the perpetual wrong brought down his very soul into unwhich he could not remedy, he had de- questioning obedience. It might indeed cided to adopt the monastic life, for some seem yet another commentary on the time before his affectionate heart could vanity of human wishes that the young resolve upon a separation from his family. monk, so tired of all mundane things, and "So great was my pain and misery," he sick at heart for truth and contact with says in the letter to his father already nature, should have found himself thrown quoted, "that if I had laid open my breast back again as soon as he had fairly taken to you, I verily believe that the very idea refuge in his cloister, upon the old misthat I was going to leave you would have erable round of philosophy, as lecturer of broken my heart." He relieved his bur- his convent. He obeyed readily, we are dened mind during this melancholy time told, which good Burlamacchi takes as by writing a little essay on "Disdain of a sign of grace in him- but who can tell the World," which he left behind with with what struggles of the reluctant simple art, "behind the books that lie in heart and that deep disappointment the window-sill," to prove hereafter an which so often attends the completion of explanation of his conduct. His mother, a long-maturing resolve? Soon after he divining some resolution in him which he wrote the letter to his father which I had not expressed, looked at him with have quoted a letter full of the tender such meaning and pitiful eyes, "as if she sophistry which we find in so many would penetrate his very heart," that the letters of this time (and indeed of all young man could not support her look. times), in which the question of duty is One April morning, as he sat by her play-begged with many a loving artifice, and ing a melancholy air upon his lute, she heart-broken beseechings brought in inturned upon him suddenly and said, My stead. "Do you not think that it is a son, that is a sign we are soon to part." very high mark of favour to have a son a Giralomo durst not risk himself to look at soldier in the army of Jesus Christ ?"... her, but, with his head bent, kept fingering If you love me, seeing that I am comthe strings with a faltering touch. posed of two parts, of soul and body, say Next day was a great festa in Ferrara, which of them you love most, the body or the 24th of April, St. George's Day - one the soul. . . . If, then, you love the soul of the many holidays which stood instead most, why not look to the good of that of freedom and justice to conciliate the soul?" These arguments have been repeople. When all the family were gone peated from the beginning of the world, out to those gay doings, which were bright- I suppose, and will be to its end, whenened and made sweet by the glorious ever a good and loving child obeys a perspring of Italy, the young man stole out sonal impulse which is contrary to filial unnoticed, and with a full heart left his duty, but not to filial tenderness. "Never father's house forever. This was in the since I was born did I suffer so great year 1475, when he was twenty-three. He mental anguish as when I felt that I was went away, lonely, across the sunny plain about to leave my own flesh and blood to Bologna, where he presented himself and go among people who were strangers at once at the Convent of St. Dominic. to me," adds the young man. But the At this melancholy moment of his life, sacrifice had then been accomplished, the youth, his heart sick of all the learned and for years thereafter the young Savanity as well as the louder crime of the vonarola, now Fra Girolamo, had to conworld, had no desire to be either priest tent himself with "the Aristotle of the or monk, having an almost hatred in his cloister instead of the Aristotle of the weary bosom of the vain studies in which world," and to go on with those dry and he had already spent so much time. He useless studies, making what attempt he asked only in his despair to be a lay could to separate from them "all vain brother, to ease his soul with simple questions, and to bring them back as work in the garden, or even, as Burla- much as he could to Christian simplicity," macchi tells us, in making the rude robes | while yet his heart burned within him,

66

and wickedness unwarned and wrong unredressed were rampant in the outside world.

Perhaps, indeed, the first effects of this desperate resolution of his, this plunge into the Church by way of escaping from the world, was to convince the young man of the corruption of the Church in a way more sharp and heartfelt than before. No doubt it directed him to look with eyes more critical and enlightened upon those ecclesiastical powers who were now the officers of his own army, and more distinctly within his range of vision; and with a Pope such as Sixtus IV., and many inferior prelates worthy of their head, it is not to be wondered at if the bitter wrath and sorrow of the young Reformer blazed higher and clearer still. As he had written in Dej Ruina Mundi (in the verses which we have already quoted), his horror of the sins of the world, so in De Ruina Ecclesia, which now followed, he laments He sees the true the sins of the Church. Church herself in a vision, and hears from her that her place has been invaded by a shameless creature,-una fallace superba meretrice. "With eyes that are never dry, with head bowed down, and sad soul," the "ancient mother" replies to him.

66

studies, Savonarola's active intelligence
which seems to have been restored to
the steadiness of common life, and to that
necessity of making the best of a lot, now
unalterable, which so often follows a de-
cisive step- seems to have made some-
thing useful and honourable. He wrote a
an epitome
Compendium of Philosophy,
of all the writings, various as they are, of
the Stagyrite," a work which, according
to Padre Marchese, "might have acted
as a stepping-stone to the Novum Or-
ganum." Another work of a similar char-
acter he had begun upon Plato, the study
of whose works had been much promoted
in Italy by the learned Greeks who were
so highly thought of in many of its intel-
lectual centres, but this Savonarola him-
self tells us he destroyed. "What good
is there in so much wisdom, when now
every old woman knows more?" he asks,
with characteristic simplicity. Such were
his occupations during the seven years
which he passed in Bologna, a time of
quiet, of rest in some respects from the
chaos of youthful fancies, and of dis-
tasteful, but bravely surmounted work.
His convent seems to have acted upon
the sorrowful young dreamer as sharp
contact with actual life so often acts upon
visionary youth. It forced him to take
up his burden and labour at common
things in the long interval of waiting be-
fore the real mission of his life came to
him. Monastic writers throw a certain
ecclesiastical romanticism over this natu-
ral result, by distinguishing it as the
fruit of monastic obedience, the new soul
of the cloister; but the same thing ap-
pears in almost all noble and strong na-
tures when life in its real aspect is ac-
cepted, not as a matter of fancy and
choice, but of unalterable necessity and
duty. There was no particular value in
the logic which Fra Girolamo taught the
young Dominicans; but there was effi-
cacy inestimable in that sense of cer-
tainty and life established which led him
to do the work which lay at his hand and
accept it, though it was not that which
pleased him best.

She took my hand, and thus with weeping, led To her poor cave, and said "When into Rome I saw that proud one pass Who 'mid soft flowers and grass Securely moves, I shut me up, and here Lead my sad life with many a tear." The wondering spectator listens, and sees her bosom torn with a thousand wounds, and hears enough "to make stones weep" of the usurpation of the harlot. Then his whole soul breaks forth in a cry, "Oh God, lady! that I could break these What utterance was great wings!" ever more characteristic of the future purpose of a beginning life? Though the antica madre" bids him rather be silent and weep, the thought of breaking those grandi ali, and striking a blow at After some years of this obscure work the thousand corruptions which disgraced Christendom, never abandoned he came to Florence, and now at last we the thoughts of the young Dominican. find him in the scene to which his hisHe had to be silent perforce for years, torical existence belongs. Professor Viland to teach the novices, and lecture lari informs us, though without giving no any authority, that the young monk came upon philosophy, as if there was greater evil in the world than a definite to his new home with hopeful and happy Syllogism; but his heart burned all the anticipations, pleased with more in his breast, and his time was to country, the purer language, the higher civilization of the people, and with the saintly associations which the blessed

come.

Even, however, out of these undesired

the fair

Antonino had left so fresh and fragrant. his flatterers reason when they applaud It is easy indeed to believe that after him. The few righteous men in the city, toiling across the rugged Apennines, the citizens who still thought of Florence when the Dominican, still young and full above all, kept apart, overwhelmed by the of natural fervour, came suddenly out tide which ran in favour of that leading from among the folds of the hills upon citizen of Florence who had gained the that glorious landscape; when he saw control of the once high-spirited and freethe beautiful vision of Florence, seated dom-loving people. Society had never in the rich garden of her valley, with flow- been more dissolute, more selfish, or ers and olive-trees, and everything that is more utterly deprived of any higher aim. beautiful in nature, incircling that proud Barren scholarship, busy over grammatcombination of everything that is noble ical questions, and elegant philosophy in art; his heart must have risen at the snipping and piecing its logical systems, sight, and some dilation of the soul, some formed the top dressing to that half sense of coming greatness have been brutal, half-superstitious ignorance which permitted to him in face of the fate he in such communities is the general porwas to accomplish there. tion of the poor. The dilettante world The state of Florence at this period dreamed hazily of a restoration of the was very remarkable. The most inde- worship of the pagan gods; Cardinal pendent and tumultuous of towns was Bembo bade his friend beware of reading spell-bound under the sway of Lorenzo Paul's epistles, lest their barbarous style de Medici, the grandson of that Cosmo should corrupt his taste; and even such who built San Marco; and scarcely a man as Pico della Mirandola declared seemed even to recollect its freedom, so the "Divina Commedia" to be inferior absorbed was it in the present advantages to the "Canti Carnascialeschi" of Loconferred by "a strong government," and renzo de Medici. This extraordinary solaced by shows, entertainments, festi- failure of taste itself, in a period which vals, pomp and display of all kinds. It stood upon its fine taste as one of its was one of those moments of classic re- highest qualities, is curious, but far from vival which have occurred more than being without parallel in the history of once in the later history of the world, the civilized world. Not so very long ago, when the higher classes of society, having indeed, among ourselves, in another age shaken themselves apart with graceful of classic revival, sometimes called Aucontempt from the lower, proceed to gustan, Pope was supposed a much frame their lives according to a pagan greater poet than Shakespeare, and much model, leaving the other and much bigger inferior names to that of Pope were half of the world to pursue its supersti-ranked as equal with, or superior to, our tions undisturbed. Florence was as near prince of poets. The whole mental a pagan city as it was possible for its rulers to make it. Its intellectual existence was entirely given up to the past; its days were spent in that worship of antiquity which has no power of discrimination, and deifies not only the wisdom but the trivialities of its golden epoch. Lorenzo reigned in the midst of a lettered crowd of classic parasites and flatterers, writing poems which his courtiers found better than Alighieri's, and surrounding himself with those eloquent slaves who make a prince's name more famous than arms or victories, and who have still left a prejudice in the minds of all literature-loving people in favour of their patron. A man of superb health and physical power, who can give himself up to debauch all night without interfering with his power of working all day, and whose mind is so versatile that he can sack a town one morning and discourse upon the beauties of Plato the next and weave joyous ballads through both occupations gives

firmament must have contracted about the heads of a people among whom such verdicts are possible; but the opinion of such a time generally is that nothing has ever been so clever, so great, so elevated as itself. Thus limited intellectually, the age of Lorenzo was still more hopeless morally, full of debauchery, cruelty, and corruption, violating oaths, betraying trusts, believing in nothing but Greek manuscripts, coins, and statues, caring for nothing but pleasure. This was the world in which Savonarola found himself when, waking from his first pleasurable impressions, he looked forth from the narrow windows of San Marco, by the side of which Angelico's angel faces stood watching the thoughts that arose in his mind. Those thoughts were not of a mirthful kind. Fair Florence lying in bonds, or rather dancing in them, with smear of blood upon her garments and loathsome song upon her lips; and the Church, yet more fair, groaning under the domination