ho had
become newly conspicuous not only as enemies of the Medici and friends
of popular government, but as thorough Piagnoni, espousing to the utmost
the doctrines and practical teaching of the Frate, and frequenting San
Marco as the seat of another Samuel: some of them men of authoritative
and handsome presence, like Francesco Valori, and perhaps also of a hot
and arrogant temper, very much gratified by an immediate divine
authority for bringing about freedom in their own way; others, like
Soderini, with less of the ardent Piagnone, and more of the wise
politician. There were men, also of family, like Piero Capponi, simply
brave undoctrinal lovers of a sober republican liberty, who preferred
fighting to arguing, and had no particular reasons for thinking any
ideas false that kept out the Medici and made room for public spirit.
At their elbows were doctors of law whose studies of Accursius and his
brethren had not so entirely consumed their ardour as to prevent them
from becoming enthusiastic Piagnoni: Messer Luca Corsini himself, for
example, who on a memorable occasion yet to come was to raise his
learned arms in street stone-throwing for the cause of religion,
freedom, and the Frate. And among the dignities who carried their black
lucco or furred mantle with an air of habitual authority, there was an
abundant sprinkling of men with more contemplative and sensitive faces:
scholars inheriting such high names as Strozzi and Acciajoli, who were
already minded to take the cowl and join the community of San Marco;
artists, wrought to a new and higher ambition by the teaching of
Savonarola, like that young painter who had lately surpassed himself in
his fresco of the divine child on the wall of the Frate's bare cell--
unconscious yet that he would one day himself wear the tonsure and the
cowl, and be called Fra Bartolommeo. There was the mystic poet Girolamo
Benevieni hastening, perhaps, to carry tidings of the beloved Frate's
speedy coming to his friend Pico della Mirandola, who was never to see
the light of another morning. There were well-born women attired with
such scrupulous plainness that their more refined grace was the chief
distinction between them and their less aristocratic sisters. There was
a predominant proportion of the genuine _popolani_ or middle class,
belonging both to the Major and Minor Arts, conscious of purses
threatened by war-taxes. And more striking and various, perhaps, than
all the other c