led to
learn thyself. Thou hast cured others: and thou thyself hast been still
diseased. Thy heart was lifted up at the beauty of thy own deeds, and
through this thou hast lost thy wisdom and art become, and shalt be to
all eternity, nothing... After so many benefits with which God has
honoured thee, thou art fallen into the depths of the sea; and after so
many gifts bestowed on thee, thou, by thy pride and vainglory, hast
scandalised all the world." And when Hope speaks and argues that the
divine love has not forsaken him, it says nothing now of a great work to
be done, but only says, "Thou art not forsaken, else why is thy heart
bowed in penitence? That too is a gift."

There is no jot of worthy evidence that from the time of his
imprisonment to the supreme moment, Savonarola thought or spoke of
himself as a martyr. The idea of martyrdom had been to him a passion
dividing the dream of the future with the triumph of beholding his work
achieved. And now, in place of both, had come a resignation which he
called by no glorifying name.

_But therefore he may the more fitly be called a martyr by his
fellow-men to all time_. For power rose against him not because of his
sins, but because of his greatness--not because he sought to deceive the
world, but because he sought to make it noble. And through that
greatness of his he endured a double agony: not only the reviling, and
the torture, and the death-throe, but the agony of sinking from the
vision of glorious achievement into that deep shadow where he could only
say, "I count as nothing: darkness encompasses me: yet the light I saw
was the true light."

CHAPTER SEVENTY TWO.

THE LAST SILENCE.

Romola had seemed to hear, as if they had been a cry, the words repeated
to her by many lips--the words uttered by Savonarola when he took leave
of those brethren of San Marco who had come to witness his signature of
the confession: "Pray for me, for God has withdrawn from me the spirit
of prophecy."

Those words had shaken her with new doubts as to the mode in which he
looked back at the past in moments of complete self-possession. And the
doubts were strengthened by more piteous things still, which soon
reached her ears.

The nineteenth of May had come, and by that day's sunshine there had
entered into Florence the two Papal Commissaries, charged with the
completion of Savonarola's trial. They entered amid the acclamations of
the people, calling for the death