, shut out from daylight
by a sevenfold series of iron bars, lay dungeons in which the objects of
the Duke's displeasure clanked chains and sighed their lives away.[2]
Within the precincts of this palace the young Savonarola learned to hate
alike the worldly vices and the despotic cruelty against which in
after-life he prophesied and fought unto the death.

[1] In this chapter on Savonarola I have made use of Villari's
_Life_ (translated by Leonard Horner, Longmans, 1863, 2 vols.),
Michelet's _Histoire de France_, vol. vii., Milman's article on
Savonarola (John Murray, 1870), Nardi's _Istoria Fiorentina_,
book ii., and the _Memoirs_ of De Comines.

[2] See p. 424.

Of his boyhood we know but little. His biographers only tell us that he
was grave and solitary, frequenting churches, praying with passionate
persistence, obstinately refusing, though otherwise docile, to join his
father in his visits to the court. Aristotle and S. Thomas Aquinas seem
to have been the favorite masters of his study. In fact he refused the
new lights of the humanists, and adhered to the ecclesiastical training
of the schoolmen. Already at the age of twenty we find him composing a
poem in Italian on the Ruin of the World, in which he cries: 'The whole
world is in confusion: all virtue is extinguished, and all good manners;
I find no living light abroad, nor one who blushes for his vices.' His
point of departure had been taken, and the keynote of his life had been
struck. The sense of intolerable sin that came upon him in Ferrara
haunted him through manhood, set his hand against the Popes and despots
of Italy, and gave peculiar tone to his prophetic utterances.

The attractions of the cloister, as a refuge from the storms of the
world, and as a rest from the torments of the sins of others, now began
to sway his mind.[1] But he communicated his desire to no one. It would
have grieved his father and his mother to find that their son, who was,
they hoped, to be a shining light at the court of Ferrara, had
determined to assume the cowl. At length, however, came the time at
which he felt that leave the world he must. 'It was on the 23d of April
1475,' says Villari; 'he was sitting with his lute and playing a sad
melody; his mother, as if moved by a spirit of divination, turned
suddenly round to him, and exclaimed mournfully, My son, that is a sign
we are soon to part. He roused himself, and continued, but with a
trembling h