The ideas of the time appear subtly expressed in the influence they produce on the persons who entertain them.  Savonarola’s mysticism and high moral purpose made him at once a prophet and a reformer, but he was not able to separate the spiritual realities of life from devotion to his party.  His courage, purity and holiness cannot but be admired, while his fanaticism is to be deplored.  George Eliot has well conceived and expressed the effect produced in all but the very greatest minds by the assumption of supernatural powers.  Savonarola was strong and great as a preacher and a reformer, weak only on the side of his visions and his faith that his party represented the kingdom of God.  Not that his visions were weak, nor are they assumed to be untrue; but his mysticism clouded his intellect, and his fanaticism led him to overlook the practical truths to be inculcated by a genuine reformer.  He is a true type of the mystical churchman of the time, who saw the corruption about him and desired a better order of things, but who hoped to secure it by reviving the past in all its imagined supernatural features.  He would have ruled the world by visions to be received by monks, and he would have made Jesus Christ the head of the republic.  Yet his visions entangled his clear intellect and perverted his moral purpose.

On the other hand, Tito Melema was intended to represent the renaissance movement on its Greek, or its aesthetic and social side.  He was not a bad man at heart, but he had no moral purpose, no ethical convictions.  He had the Greek love of ease, enjoyment and unconcern for the morrow; a spirit which the renaissance revived in many of its literary devotees.  He lived for the day, for self, in the delight of music, art, social intercourse and sensual enjoyment.  He had the renaissance quickness of assuming all parts, its love of wide and pretentious learning, its superficial scholarship, its social and political deftness and flexibility.  The dry, minute, unprofitable spirit of criticism is well indicated by Bardo Bardi, which had no originality and no fresh vitality, but which loved to comment on the classic writers at tedious length, and to collate passages for purposes the most foreign from any practical aim life could possibly afford.  In the conception of Tito, George Eliot has quite surpassed herself, and in all literature there is no delineation of a character surpassing this.  One of her critics says there is no character in her novels “more subtly devised or more consistently developed.  His serpentine beauty, his winning graciousness, his aesthetic refinement, his masculine energy of intellect, his insinuating affectionateness, with his selfish love of pleasure and his cowardly recoil from pain, his subdulous serenity and treacherous calm, as of a faithless summer sea, make up a being that at once fascinates and repels, that invites love, but turns our love into loathing almost before we have given it.” [Footnote:  Westminster Review, July,