y. For Florence erelong became the city of his love, the
first-born of his yearnings.

In the cloisters of San Marco, enriched with splendid libraries by the
liberality of the Medicean princes, he was at peace. The walls of that
convent had recently been decorated with frescoes by Fra Angelico, even
as a man might crowd the leaves of a missal with illuminations. Among
these Savonarola meditated and was happy. But in the pulpit and in
contact with the holiday folk of Florence he was ill at ease. Lorenzo
de' Medici overshadowed the whole city. Lorenzo, in whom the pagan
spirit of the Renaissance, the spirit of free culture, found a proper
incarnation, was the very opposite of Savonarola, who had already judged
the classical revival by its fruits, and had conceived a spiritual
resurrection for his country. At Florence a passionate love of art and
learning--the enthusiasm which prompted men to spend their fortunes upon
MSS. and statues, the sensibility to beauty which produced the
masterworks of Donatello and Ghiberti, the thirst for knowledge which
burned in Pico and Poliziano and Ficino--existed side by side with
impudent immorality, religious deadness, cold contempt for truth, and
cynical admiration of successful villainy. Both the good and the evil
which flourished on this fertile soil so luxuriantly were combined in
the versatile genius of the merchant prince, whose policy it was to
stifle freedom by caressing the follies, vices, and intellectual tastes
of his people.

The young Savonarola was as yet no match for Lorenzo. And whither could
he look for help? The reform of morals he so ardently desired was not to
be expected from the Church. Florence well knew that Sixtus had plotted
to murder the Medici before the altar at the moment of the elevation of
the Host. Excommunicated for a deed of justice after the failure of this
Popish plot, the city had long been at war with the pontiff. If anywhere
it was in the cells of the philosophers, in that retreat where Ficino
burned his lamp to Plato, in that hall where the Academy crowned their
master's bust with laurels, that the more sober-minded citizens found
ghostly comfort and advice. But from this philosophy the fervent soul of
Savonarola turned with no less loathing, and with more contempt, than
from the Canti Carnascialeschi and Aristophanic pageants of Lorenzo,
which made Florence at Carnival time affect the fashions of Athens
during the Dionysia. It is true that Italy