dson of a famous doctor of Padua,
Girolamo Savonarola had entered the Dominican Order at Bologna when he
was twenty-two years old, finding the world but a wretched place, and
the wickedness of men more than he could bear. Something of this strange
and almost passionate pessimism remained with him his whole life long.
In 1481 he had been sent to the convent of S. Marco, in Florence, when
Lorenzo de' Medici had been at the head of affairs for some twelve
years. The Pazzi conspiracy, in which Giuliano de' Medici lost his life,
had come in 1478, and Lorenzo was fixed more firmly than ever in the
affections of the people. Simonetta had been borne like a dead goddess
through the streets of the city to burial; Lorenzo was already busy with
those carnival songs which, as some thought, were written to corrupt the
people: the Renaissance had come. "Gladius Domini super terram cite et
velociter," thought Savonarola, unable to understand that life from
which he had fled into the cloister. It was the first voice that had
been raised against the resurrection of the Gods, but at that moment
Martin Luther was lying in his mother's arms, while his father worked in
the mines at Eisleben: the Reaction was already born.

On a Latin city such as Florence was, Savonarola at first made little or
no impression; too often the friars had prophesied evil for no cause,
wandering through every little city in Italy denouncing the Signori. It
was in San Gemignano, even to-day the most medieval of Tuscan cities, a
place of towers and winding narrow ways, that Savonarola first won a
hearing; and so it was not till nine years after his first coming to her
that Florence seems to have listened to his prophecy, when, in August
1490, in S. Marco he began to preach on the Revelation of St. John the
Divine. It was a programme half political, half spiritual, that he
suggested to those who heard him, the reformation of the Church and the
fear of a God who had been forgotten but who would not forget. In the
spring of the year following, so great were the crowds who flocked to
hear his half-political discourses that he had to preach in the Duomo.
There unmistakably we are face to face with a political agitator. "God
intends to punish Lorenzo Magnifico,--yes, and his friends too"; and
when, a little later, he was made prior of S. Marco, he refused to
receive Lorenzo in the house his grandfather had built. In the following
year Lorenzo died; Savonarola, as the tale