ly implied no more than that wavering
of belief concerning his own impressions and motives which most human
beings who have not a stupid inflexibility of self-confidence must be
liable to under a marked change of external conditions. In a life where
the experience was so tumultuously mixed as it must have been in the
Prate's, what a possibility was opened for a change of self-judgment,
when, instead of eyes that venerated and knees that knelt, instead of a
great work on its way to accomplishment, and in its prosperity stamping
the agent as a chosen instrument, there came the hooting and the
spitting and the curses of the crowd; and then the hard faces of enemies
made judges; and then the horrible torture, and with the torture the
irrepressible cry, "It is true, what you would have me say: let me go:
do not torture me again: yes, yes, I am guilty. O God! Thy stroke has
reached me!"

As Romola thought of the anguish that must have followed the
confession--whether, in the subsequent solitude of the prison,
conscience retracted or confirmed the self-taxing words--that anguish
seemed to be pressing on her own heart and urging the slow bitter tears.
Every vulgar self-ignorant person in Florence was glibly pronouncing on
this man's demerits, while _he_ was knowing a depth of sorrow which can
only be known to the soul that has loved and sought the most perfect
thing, and beholds itself fallen.

She had not then seen--what she saw afterwards--the evidence of the
Frate's mental state after he had had thus to lay his mouth in the dust.
As the days went by, the reports of new unpublished examinations,
eliciting no change of confessions, ceased; Savonarola was left alone in
his prison and allowed pen and ink for a while, that, if he liked, he
might use his poor bruised and strained right arm to write with. He
wrote; but what he wrote was no vindication of his innocence, no protest
against the proceedings used towards him: it was a continued colloquy
with that divine purity with which he sought complete reunion; it was
the outpouring of self-abasement; it was one long cry for inward
renovation. No lingering echoes of the old vehement self-assertion,
"Look at my work, for it is good, and those who set their faces against
it are the children of the devil!" The voice of Sadness tells him, "God
placed thee in the midst of the people even as if thou hadst been one of
the excellent. In this way thou hast taught others, and hast fai