he
grass-grown streets of the hushed city remember that here the first
flash of authentic genius kindled in Savonarola's soul. Here for the
first time he prophesied: 'The church will be scourged, then
regenerated, and this quickly.' These are the celebrated three
conclusions, the three points to which Savonarola in all his prophetic
utterances adhered.

But not yet had he fully entered on his vocation. His voice was weak;
his style uncertain; his soul, we may believe, still wavering between
strange dread and awful joy, as he beheld, through many a backward
rolling mist of doubt, the mantle of the prophets descend upon him.
Already he had abandoned the schoolmen for the Bible. Already he had
learned by heart each verse of the Old and New Testaments. Pondering on
their texts, he had discovered four separate interpretations for every
suggestion of Sacred Writ. For some of the pregnant utterances of the
prophets he found hundreds, pouring forth metaphor and illustration in
wild and dazzling profusion of audacious, uncouth imagery. The flame
which began to smoulder in him at San Gemignano burst forth into a blaze
at Brescia, in 1486. Savonarola was now aged thirty-four. 'Midway upon
the path of life' he opened the Book of Revelation: he figured to the
people of Brescia the four-and-twenty elders rising to denounce the sins
of Italy, and to declare the calamities that must ensue. He pictured to
them their city flowing with blood. His voice, which now became the
interpreter of his soul, in its resonance and earnestness and piercing
shrillness, thrilled his hearers with strange terror. Already they
believed his prophecy; and twenty-six years later, when the soldiers of
Gaston de Foix slaughtered six thousand souls in the streets of Brescia,
her citizens recalled the Apocalyptic warnings of the Dominican monk.

As Savonarola is now launched upon his vocation of prophecy, this is the
right moment to describe his personal appearance and his style of
preaching. We have abundant material for judging what his features were,
and how they flashed beneath the storm of inspiration.[1] Fra
Bartolommeo, one of his followers, painted a profile of him in the
character of S. Peter Martyr. This shows all the benignity and grace of
expression which his stern lineaments could assume. It is a picture of
the sweet and gentle nature latent within the fiery arraigner of his
nation at the bar of God. In contemporary medals the face appears hard,
ke