the Church was too wise to discountenance or to suppress, although the preachers of repentance were often insubordinate and sometimes even hostile to the Papal system.  The names of Arnold of Brescia, San Bernardino of Siena, John of Vicenza, Jacopo Bussolari, Alberto da Lecce, Giovanni Capistrano, Jacopo della Marca, Girolamo Savonarola, bring before the memory of those who are acquainted with Italian history innumerable pictures of multitudes commoved to tears, of tyrannies destroyed and constitutions founded by tumultuous assemblies, of hostile parties and vindictive nobles locked in fraternal embraces, of cities clothed in sackcloth for their sins, of exhortations to peace echoing by the banks of rivers swollen with blood, of squares and hillsides resonant with sobs, of Lenten nights illuminated with bonfires of Vanity.[1] In the midst of these melodramatic scenes towers the single form of a Dominican or Franciscan friar:  while one voice thundering woe or pleading peace dominates the crowd.  Of the temporary effects produced by these preachers there can be no question.  The changes which they wrought in states and cities prove that the enthusiasm they aroused was more than merely hysterical.  Savonarola, the greatest of his class, founded not only a transient commonwealth in Florence, but also a political party of importance, and left his lasting impress on the greatest soul of the sixteenth century in Italy—­Michael Angelo Buonarroti.  There was a real religious vigor in the people corresponding to the preacher’s zeal.  But the action of this earnest mood was intermittent and spasmodic.  It coexisted with too much superstition and with passions too vehemently restless to form a settled tone of character.  In this respect the Italian nation stands not extravagantly pictured in the life of Cellini, whose violence, self-indulgence, keen sense of pleasure, and pagan delight in physical beauty were interrupted at intervals by inexplicable interludes of repentance, Bible-reading, psalm-singing, and visions.  To delineate Cellini will be the business of a distant chapter.  The form of the greatest of Italian preachers must occupy the foreground of the next.

    [1] I have thrown into an appendix some of the principal
    passages from the chronicles about revivals in mediaeval Italy.

Before closing the imperfect and scattered notices collected in this chapter, it will be well to attempt some recapitulation of the points already suggested.  Without committing ourselves to the dogmatism of a theory, we are led to certain general conclusions on the subject of Italian society in the sixteenth century.  The fierce party quarrels which closed the Middle Ages had accustomed the population to violence, and this violence survived in the too frequent occurrence of brutal crimes.  The artificial sovereignty of the despots being grounded upon perfidy, it followed that guile and fraud came to be recognized in private no less than public life.  With the emergence of