Of his boyhood we know but little.  His biographers only tell us that he was grave and solitary, frequenting churches, praying with passionate persistence, obstinately refusing, though otherwise docile, to join his father in his visits to the court.  Aristotle and S. Thomas Aquinas seem to have been the favorite masters of his study.  In fact he refused the new lights of the humanists, and adhered to the ecclesiastical training of the schoolmen.  Already at the age of twenty we find him composing a poem in Italian on the Ruin of the World, in which he cries:  ’The whole world is in confusion:  all virtue is extinguished, and all good manners; I find no living light abroad, nor one who blushes for his vices.’  His point of departure had been taken, and the keynote of his life had been struck.  The sense of intolerable sin that came upon him in Ferrara haunted him through manhood, set his hand against the Popes and despots of Italy, and gave peculiar tone to his prophetic utterances.

The attractions of the cloister, as a refuge from the storms of the world, and as a rest from the torments of the sins of others, now began to sway his mind.[1] But he communicated his desire to no one.  It would have grieved his father and his mother to find that their son, who was, they hoped, to be a shining light at the court of Ferrara, had determined to assume the cowl.  At length, however, came the time at which he felt that leave the world he must.  ’It was on the 23d of April 1475,’ says Villari; ’he was sitting with his lute and playing a sad melody; his mother, as if moved by a spirit of divination, turned suddenly round to him, and exclaimed mournfully, My son, that is a sign we are soon to part.  He roused himself, and continued, but with a trembling hand, to touch the strings of the lute, without raising his eyes from the ground.’  This would make a picture:  spring twilight in the quaint Italian room, with perhaps a branch of fig-tree or of bay across the open window; the mother looking up with anxious face from her needlework; the youth, with those terrible eyes and tense lips and dilated nostrils of the future prophet, not yet worn by years of care, but strongly marked and unmistakable, bending over the melancholy chords of the lute, dressed almost for the last time in secular attire.

[1] Often in later life Savonarola cried that he had sought the cloister to find rest, but that God had chosen, instead of bringing him into calm waters, to cast him on a tempest-swollen sea.  See the Sermon quoted by Villari, vol. i. p. 298.

On the very next day Girolamo left Ferrara in secret and journeyed to Bologna.  There he entered the order of S. Dominic, the order of the Preachers, the order of his master S. Thomas, the order too, let us remember, of inquisitorial crusades.  The letter written to his father after taking this step is memorable.  In it he says:  ’The motives by which I have been led to enter into a religious life are these:  the great misery of the world; the iniquities of men, their rapes, adulteries, robberies, their pride, idolatry, and fearful blasphemies:  so that things have come to such a pass that no one can be found acting righteously.  Many times a day have I repeated with tears the verse: