igned in cities,
and rapacious priests fattened on the credulity of the people. Think of
monks itinerating Europe to sell indulgences for sin; of monasteries and
convents filled, not with sublime enthusiasts as in earlier times, but
with gluttons and sensualists, living in concubinage and greedy of the
very things which primitive monasticism denounced and abhorred! Think of
boys elevated to episcopal thrones, and the sons of popes made cardinals
and princes! Think of churches desecrated by spectacles which were
demoralizing, and a worship of saints and images which had become
idolatrous,--a degrading superstition among the people, an infidel
apathy among the higher classes: not infidel speculations, for these
were reserved for more enlightened times, but an indifference to what is
ennobling, to all vital religion, worthy of the Sophists in the time
of Socrates!

It was in this age of religious apathy and scandalous vices, yet of
awakening intelligence and artistic glories, when the greatest
enthusiasm was manifested for the revived literature and sculptured
marbles of classic Greece and Rome, that Savonarola appeared in Florence
as a reformer and preacher and statesman, near the close of the
fifteenth century, when Columbus was seeking a western passage to India;
when Michael Angelo was moulding the "Battle of Hercules with the
Centaurs;" when Ficino was teaching the philosophy of Plato; when
Alexander VI. was making princes of his natural children; when Bramante
was making plans for a new St. Peter's; when Cardinal Bembo was writing
Latin essays; when Lorenzo de' Medici was the flattered patron of both
scholars and artists, and the city over which he ruled with so much
magnificence was the most attractive place in Europe, next to that other
city on the banks of the Tiber, whose wonders and glories have never
been exhausted, and will probably survive the revolutions of
unknown empires.

But Savonarola was not a native of Florence. He was born in the year
1452 at Ferrara, belonged to a good family, and received an expensive
education, being destined to the profession of medicine. He was a sad,
solitary, pensive, but precocious young man, whose youth was marked by
an unfortunate attachment to a haughty Florentine girl. He did not
cherish her memory and dedicate to her a life-labor, like Dante, but
became very dejected and very pious. His piety assumed, of course, the
ascetic type, for there was scarcely any other in tha