owed much to the elevated
theism developed by Platonic students. While the humanists were exalting
pagan license, and while the Church was teaching the worst kinds of
immorality, the philosophers kept alive in cultivated minds a sense of
God.

But the monk, nourished on the Bible and S. Thomas, valued this
confusion of spirits and creeds in a chaos of indiscriminate erudition,
at a small price. He had the courage in the fifteenth century at
Florence to proclaim that the philosophers were in hell, and that an old
woman knew more of saving faith than Plato. Savonarola and Lorenzo were
opposed as champions of two hostile principles alike emergent from the
very life of the Renaissance: paganism reborn in the one, the spirit of
the gospel in the other. Both were essentially modern; for it was the
function of the Renaissance to restore to the soul of man its double
heritage of the classic past and Christian liberty, freeing it from the
fetters which the Middle Ages had forged. Not yet, however, were Lorenzo
and Savonarola destined to clash. The obscure friar at this time was
preaching to an audience of some thirty persons in San Lorenzo, while
Poliziano and all the fashion of the town crowded to the sermons of Fra
Mariano da Genezzano in Santo Spirito. This man flattered the taste of
the moment by composing orations on the model of Ficino's addresses to
the Academy, and by complimenting Christianity upon its similarity to
Platonism. Who could then have guessed that beneath the cowl of the
harsh-voiced Dominican, his rival, burned thoughts that in a few years
would inflame Florence with a conflagration powerful enough to destroy
the fabric of the Medicean despotism?

From Florence, where he had met with no success, Savonarola was sent to
San Gemignano, a little town on the top of a high hill between Florence
and Siena. We now visit San Gemignano in order to study some fading
frescoes of Gozzoli and Ghirlandajo, or else for the sake of its strange
feudal towers, tall pillars of brown stone, crowded together within the
narrow circle of the town walls. Very beautiful is the prospect from
these ramparts on a spring morning, when the song of nightingales and
the scent of acacia flowers ascend together from the groves upon the
slopes beneath. The gray Tuscan landscape for scores and scores of miles
all round melts into blueness, like the blueness of the sky, flecked
here and there with wandering cloud-shadows. Let those who pace t