It was in this age of religious apathy and scandalous vices, yet of awakening intelligence and artistic glories, when the greatest enthusiasm was manifested for the revived literature and sculptured marbles of classic Greece and Rome, that Savonarola appeared in Florence as a reformer and preacher and statesman, near the close of the fifteenth century, when Columbus was seeking a western passage to India; when Michael Angelo was moulding the “Battle of Hercules with the Centaurs;” when Ficino was teaching the philosophy of Plato; when Alexander VI. was making princes of his natural children; when Bramante was making plans for a new St. Peter’s; when Cardinal Bembo was writing Latin essays; when Lorenzo de’ Medici was the flattered patron of both scholars and artists, and the city over which he ruled with so much magnificence was the most attractive place in Europe, next to that other city on the banks of the Tiber, whose wonders and glories have never been exhausted, and will probably survive the revolutions of unknown empires.

But Savonarola was not a native of Florence.  He was born in the year 1452 at Ferrara, belonged to a good family, and received an expensive education, being destined to the profession of medicine.  He was a sad, solitary, pensive, but precocious young man, whose youth was marked by an unfortunate attachment to a haughty Florentine girl.  He did not cherish her memory and dedicate to her a life-labor, like Dante, but became very dejected and very pious.  His piety assumed, of course, the ascetic type, for there was scarcely any other in that age, and he entered a Dominican convent, as Luther, a few years later, entered an Augustinian.  But he was not an original genius, or a bold and independent thinker like Luther, so he was not emancipated from the ideas of his age.  How few men can go counter to prevailing ideas!  It takes a prodigious genius, and a fearless, inquiring mind, to break away from their bondage.  Abraham could renounce the idolatries which surrounded him, when called by a supernatural voice; Paul could give up the Phariseeism which reigned in the Jewish schools and synagogues, when stricken blind by the hand of God; Luther could break away from monastic rules and papal denunciation, when taught by the Bible the true ground of justification,—­but Savonarola could not.  He pursued the path to heaven in the beaten track, after the fashion of Jerome and Bernard and Thomas Aquinas, after the style of the Middle Ages, and was sincere, devout, and lofty, like the saints of the fifth century, and read his Bible as they did, and essayed a high religious life; but he was stern, gloomy, and austere, emaciated by fasts and self-denial.  He had, however, those passive virtues which Mediaeval piety ever enjoined,—­yea, which Christ himself preached upon the Mount, and which Protestantism, in the arrogance of reason, is in danger of losing sight of,—­humility, submission, and contempt of material gains.  He won the admiration of his superiors for his attainments and his piety, being equally versed in Aristotle and the Holy Scriptures.  He delighted most in the Old Testament heroes and prophets, and caught their sternness and invective.