was kneeling and holding one hand of the dying man
between his own, was Angelo Poliziano, the Catullus of the fifteenth
century, a classic of the lighter sort, who in his Latin verses might
have been mistaken for a poet of the Augustan age.

The third, who was standing up and leaning against one of the twisted
columns of the bed-head, following with profound sadness the progress of
the malady which he read in the face of his departing friend, was the
famous Pico della Mirandola, who at the age of twenty could speak
twenty-two languages, and who had offered to reply in each of these
languages to any seven hundred questions that might be put to him by the
twenty most learned men in the whole world, if they could be assembled at
Florence.

The man on the bed was Lorenzo the Magnificent, who at the beginning of
the year had been attacked by a severe and deep-seated fever, to which
was added the gout, a hereditary ailment in his family. He had found at
last that the draughts containing dissolved pearls which the quack
doctor, Leoni di Spoleto, prescribed for him (as if he desired to adapt
his remedies rather to the riches of his patient than to his necessities)
were useless and unavailing, and so he had come to understand that he
must part from those gentle-tongued women of his, those sweet-voiced
poets, his palaces and their rich hangings; therefore he had summoned to
give him absolution for his sins--in a man of less high place they might
perhaps have been called crimes--the Dominican, Giralamo Francesco
Savonarola.

It was not, however, without an inward fear, against which the praises of
his friends availed nothing, that the pleasure-seeker and usurper awaited
that severe and gloomy preacher by whose word's all Florence was stirred,
and on whose pardon henceforth depended all his hope far another world.

Indeed, Savonarola was one of those men of stone, coming, like the statue
of the Commandante, to knock at the door of a Don Giovanni, and in the
midst of feast and orgy to announce that it is even now the moment to
begin to think of Heaven. He had been barn at Ferrara, whither his
family, one of the most illustrious of Padua, had been called by Niccolo,
Marchese d'Este, and at the age of twenty-three, summoned by an
irresistible vocation, had fled from his father's house, and had taken
the vows in the cloister of Dominican monks at Florence. There, where he
was appointed by his superiors to give lessons in philosop