then partook of the communion, and descended to the public
square, while the crowd gazed silently and with trepidation, and was led
with his companions to the first tribunal, where he was disrobed of his
ecclesiastical dress. Then they were led to another tribunal, and
delivered to the secular arm; then to another, where sentence of death
was read; and then to the place of execution,--not a burning funeral
pyre, but a scaffold, which mounting, composed, calm, absorbed,
Savonarola submitted his neck to the hangman, in the forty-fifth year of
his life: a martyr to the cause of Christ, not for an attack on the
Church, or its doctrines, or its institutions, but for having denounced
the corruption and vices of those who ruled it,--for having preached
against sin.

Thus died one of the greatest and best men of his age, one of the truest
and purest whom the Catholic Church has produced in any age. He was
stern, uncompromising, austere, but a reformer and a saint; a man who
was merciful and generous in the possession of power; an enlightened
statesman, a sound theologian, and a fearless preacher of that
righteousness which exalteth a nation. He had no vices, no striking
defects. He lived according to the rules of the convent he governed with
the same wisdom that he governed a city, and he died in the faith of the
primitive apostles. His piety was monastic, but his spirit was
progressive, sympathizing with liberty, advocating public morality. He
was unselfish, disinterested, and true to his Church, his conscience,
and his cause,--a noble specimen both of a man and Christian, whose
deeds and example form part of the inheritance of an admiring posterity.
We pity his closing days, after such a career of power and influence;
but we may as well compassionate Socrates or Paul. The greatest lights
of the world have gone out in martyrdom, to be extinguished, however,
only for a time, and then to loom up again in another age, and burn with
inextinguishable brightness to remotest generations, as examples of the
power of faith and truth in this wicked and rebellious world,--a world
to be finally redeemed by the labors and religion of just such men,
whose days are days of sadness, protest, and suffering, and whose hours
of triumph and exaltation are not like those of conquerors, nor like
those whose eyes stand out with fatness, but few and far between. "I
have loved righteousness, I have hated iniquity," said the great
champion of the Media