reddened balls
brought from the Levant, intended to produce on a sallow cheek a sudden
bloom of the most ingenuous falsity? If so, let her bring them down and
cast them into the basket of doom. Or, perhaps, she had ringlets and
coils of "dead hair?"--if so, let her bring them to the streetdoor, not
on her head, but in her hands, and publicly renounce the Anathema which
hid the respectable signs of age under a ghastly mockery of youth. And,
in reward, she would hear fresh young voices pronounce a blessing on her
and her house.

The beardless inquisitors, organised into little regiments, doubtless
took to their work very willingly. To coerce people by shame, or other
spiritual pelting, into the giving up of things it will probably vex
them to part with, is a form of piety to which the boyish mind is most
readily converted; and if some obstinately wicked men got enraged and
threatened the whip or the cudgel, this also was exciting. Savonarola
himself evidently felt about the training of these boys the difficulty
weighing on all minds with noble yearnings towards great ends, yet with
that imperfect perception of means which forces a resort to some
supernatural constraining influence as the only sure hope. The
Florentine youth had had very evil habits and foul tongues: it seemed at
first an unmixed blessing when they were got to shout "_Viva Gesu_!"
But Savonarola was forced at last to say from the pulpit, "There is a
little too much shouting of `_Viva Gesu_!' This constant utterance of
sacred words brings them into contempt. Let me have no more of that
shouting till the next Festa."

Nevertheless, as the long stream of white-robed youthfulness, with its
little red crosses and olive wreaths, had gone to the Duomo at dawn this
morning to receive the communion from the hands of Savonarola, it was a
sight of beauty; and, doubtless, many of those young souls were laying
up memories of hope and awe that might save them from ever resting in a
merely vulgar view of their work as men and citizens. There is no kind
of conscious obedience that is not an advance on lawlessness, and these
boys became the generation of men who fought greatly and endured greatly
in the last struggle of their Republic. Now, in the intermediate hours
between the early communion and dinner-time, they were making their last
perambulations to collect alms and vanities, and this was why Romola saw
the slim white figures moving to and fro about the ba