e everything she possessed, Pisa was ready to defend them with
her life, Florence spent hundreds of thousands of florins to possess
herself of them--for in them was thought to lie the secret of the law of
Rome. Who knows what Italy, under the heel of the barbarian, does not
owe to these faded pages, and through Italy the world? They were, as it
were, the symbol of Latin civilisation in the midst of German barbarism.
Here too is that most ancient Virgil which the French stole in 1804.
Here is Petrarch's Horace and a Dante transcribed by Villani; and, best
of all, the only ancient codex in the world of what remains to us of
Aeschylus, of what is left of Sophocles. It is in such a place that we
may best recognise the true greatness of the abused Medici. Tyrants
they may have been, but when the mob was tyrant it satisfied itself with
destroying what they with infinite labour had gathered together for the
advancement of learning, the civilisation of the world. What, then, was
that Savonarola whom all have conspired to praise, whose windy
prophecies, whose blasphemous cursings men count as so precious? In
truth in his fashion he was but a tyrant too--a tyrant, and a poor one,
and therefore the more dangerous, the more disastrous. To the Medici we
owe much of what is most beautiful in Florence--the loveliest work of
Botticelli, of Brunellesco, of Donatello, of Lippo Lippi, of
Michelangelo, and the rest, to say nothing of such a priceless
collection of books and MSS. as this. Is, then, the work of Marsilio
Ficino nothing, the labours of a thousand forgotten humanists? What do
we owe to Savonarola? He burnt the pictures which to his sensual mind
suggested its own obscenity; he stole the MSS., and no doubt would have
destroyed them too, to write instead his own rhetorical and
extraordinary denunciations of what he did not understand. Who can deny
that when he proposed to give freedom to Florence he was dreaming of a
new despotism, the despotism, if not of himself, of that Jesus whom he
believed had inspired him, and on whom he turned in his rage? That he
was brave we know, but so was Cataline; that he believed in himself we
like to believe, and so did Arius of Alexandria; that he carried the
people with him is certain, and so did they who crucified Jesus; but
that he was a turbulent fellow, a puritan, a vandal, a boaster, a
wind-bag, a discredited prophet, and a superstitious failure, we also
know, as he doubtless did at last, when