the English people wearied of the yoke of a Puritan Protector, and
hankered for their old pleasures, so the Florentines remembered the
sports and spectacles and _fetes_ of the old Medicean rule. Savonarola
had arrayed against himself the enemies of popular liberty, the patrons
of demoralizing excitements, the partisans of the banished Medici, and
even the friends and counsellors of the Pope. The dreadful denunciation
of sin in high places was as offensive to the Pope as the exposure of a
tyrannical usurpation was to the family of the old lords of Florence;
and his enemies took counsel together, and schemed for his overthrow. If
the irritating questions and mockeries of Socrates could not be endured
at Athens, how could the bitter invectives and denunciations of
Savonarola find favor at Florence? The fate of prophets is to be stoned.
Martyrdom and persecution, in some form or other, are as inevitable to
the man who sails against the stream, as a broken constitution and a
diseased body are to a sensualist, a glutton, or a drunkard. Impatience
under rebuke is as certain as the operation of natural law.

The bitterest and most powerful enemy of the Prior of St. Mark was the
Pope himself,--Alexander VI., of the infamous family of the
Borgias,--since his private vices were exposed, and by one whose order
had been especially devoted to the papal empire. In the eyes of the
wicked Pope, the Florentine reformer was a traitor and conspirator,
disloyal and dangerous. At first he wished to silence him by soft and
deceitful letters and tempting bribes, offering to him a cardinal's hat,
and inviting him to Rome. But Savonarola refused alike the bribe and the
invitation. His Lenten sermons became more violent and daring. "If I
have preached and written anything heretical," said this intrepid monk,
"I am willing to make a public recantation. I have always shown
obedience to my church; but it is my duty to obey God rather than man."
This sounds like Luther at the Diet of Worms; but he was more
defenceless than Luther, since the Saxon reformer was protected by
powerful princes, and was backed by the enthusiasm of Northern Germans.
Yet the Florentine preacher boldly continued his attacks on all
hypocritical religion, and on the vices of Rome, not as incidental to
the system, but extraneous,--the faults of a man or age. The Pope became
furious, to be thus balked by a Dominican monk, and in one of the cities
of Italy,--a city that had not reb