on the printed document. Was not the list of
sixteen examiners half made up of the prophet's bitterest enemies? Was
not the notorious Dolfo Spini one of the new Eight prematurely elected,
in order to load the dice against a man whose ruin had been determined
on by the party in power? It was but a murder with slow formalities
that was being transacted in the Old Palace. The Signoria had resolved
to drive a good bargain with the Pope and the Duke of Milan, by
extinguishing the man who was as great a molestation to vicious citizens
and greedy foreign tyrants as to a corrupt clergy. The Frate had been
doomed beforehand, and the only question that was pretended to exist now
was, whether the Republic, in return for a permission to lay a tax on
ecclesiastical property, should deliver him alive into the hands of the
Pope, or whether the Pope should further concede to the Republic what
its dignity demanded--the privilege of hanging and burning its own
prophet on its own piazza.

Who, under such circumstances, would give full credit to this so-called
confession? If the Frate had denied his prophetic gift, the denial had
only been wrenched from him by the agony of torture--agony that, in his
sensitive frame, must quickly produce raving. What if these wicked
examiners declared that he had only had the torture of the rope and
pulley thrice, and only on one day, and that his confessions had been
made when he was under no bodily coercion--was that to be believed? He
had been tortured much more; he had been tortured in proportion to the
distress his confessions had created in the hearts of those who loved
him.

Other friends of Savonarola, who were less ardent partisans, did not
doubt the substantial genuineness of the confession, however it might
have been coloured by the transpositions and additions of the notary;
but they argued indignantly that there was nothing which could warrant a
condemnation to death, or even to grave punishment. It must be clear to
all impartial men that if this examination represented the only evidence
against the Frate, he would die, not for any crime, but because he had
made himself inconvenient to the Pope, to the rapacious Italian States
that wanted to dismember their Tuscan neighbour, and to those unworthy
citizens who sought to gratify their private ambition in opposition to
the common weal.

Not a shadow of political crime had been proved against him. Not one
stain had been detected on h