econd, who 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