But I have dwelt too long on the characteristics of that eloquence which produced such a great effect on the people of Florence in the latter part of the fifteenth century.  That ardent, intense, and lofty monk, world-deep like Dante, not world-wide like Shakspeare, Who filled the cathedral church with eager listeners, was not destined to uninterrupted triumphs.  His career was short; he could not even retain his influence.  As the English people wearied of the yoke of a Puritan Protector, and hankered for their old pleasures, so the Florentines remembered the sports and spectacles and fetes of the old Medicean rule.  Savonarola had arrayed against himself the enemies of popular liberty, the patrons of demoralizing excitements, the partisans of the banished Medici, and even the friends and counsellors of the Pope.  The dreadful denunciation of sin in high places was as offensive to the Pope as the exposure of a tyrannical usurpation was to the family of the old lords of Florence; and his enemies took counsel together, and schemed for his overthrow.  If the irritating questions and mockeries of Socrates could not be endured at Athens, how could the bitter invectives and denunciations of Savonarola find favor at Florence?  The fate of prophets is to be stoned.  Martyrdom and persecution, in some form or other, are as inevitable to the man who sails against the stream, as a broken constitution and a diseased body are to a sensualist, a glutton, or a drunkard.  Impatience under rebuke is as certain as the operation of natural law.

The bitterest and most powerful enemy of the Prior of St. Mark was the Pope himself,—­Alexander VI., of the infamous family of the Borgias,—­since his private vices were exposed, and by one whose order had been especially devoted to the papal empire.  In the eyes of the wicked Pope, the Florentine reformer was a traitor and conspirator, disloyal and dangerous.  At first he wished to silence him by soft and deceitful letters and tempting bribes, offering to him a cardinal’s hat, and inviting him to Rome.  But Savonarola refused alike the bribe and the invitation.  His Lenten sermons became more violent and daring.  “If I have preached and written anything heretical,” said this intrepid monk, “I am willing to make a public recantation.  I have always shown obedience to my church; but it is my duty to obey God rather than man.”  This sounds like Luther at the Diet of Worms; but he was more defenceless than Luther, since the Saxon reformer was protected by powerful princes, and was backed by the enthusiasm of Northern Germans.  Yet the Florentine preacher boldly continued his attacks on all hypocritical religion, and on the vices of Rome, not as incidental to the system, but extraneous,—­the faults of a man or age.  The Pope became furious, to be thus balked by a Dominican monk, and in one of the cities of Italy,—­a city that had not rebelled against his authority.  He complained bitterly to the Florentine ambassador,