Heu, fuge crudeles terras, fuge littus avarum!

I could not endure the enormous wickedness of the blinded people of Italy; and the more so because I saw everywhere virtue despised and vice honored.’  We see clearly that Savonarola’s vocation took its origin in a deep sense of the wickedness of the world.  It was the same spirit as that which drove the early Christians of Alexandria into the Thebaid.  Austere and haggard, consumed with the zeal of the Lord, he had moved long enough among the Ferrarese holiday-makers.  Those elegant young men in tight hose and particolored jackets, with oaths upon their lips and deeds of violence and lust within their hearts, were no associates for him.  It is touching, however, to note that no text of Ezekiel or Jeremiah, but Virgil’s musical hexameter, sounded through his soul the warning to depart.

In this year Savonarola composed another poem, this time on the Ruin of the Church.  In his boyhood he had witnessed the pompous shows which greeted AEneas Sylvius, more like a Roman general than a new-made Pope, on his entrance into Ferrara.  Since then he had seen the monster Sixtus mount the Papal throne.  No wonder if he, who had fled from the world to the Church for purity and peace, should need to vent his passion in a song.  ‘Where,’ he cries, ’are the doctors of old times, the saints, the learning, charity, chastity of the past?’ The Church answers by displaying her rent raiment and wounded body, and by pointing to the cavern in which she has to make her home.  ‘Who,’ exclaims the poet, ’has wrought this wrong?’ Una fallace, superba meretrice—­Rome!  Then indeed the passion of the novice breaks in fire:—­

        Deh! per Dio, donna,
  Se romper si potria quelle grandi ale!

The Church replies:—­

  Tu piangi e taci:  e questo meglio parmi.

No other answer could be given to Savonarola’s impatient yearnings even by his own hot heart, while he yet remained a young and unknown monk in Bologna.  Nor, strive as he might strive through all his life, was it granted to him to break those outspread wings of arrogant Rome.

The career of Savonarola as a preacher began in 1482, when he was sent first to Ferrara and then to Florence on missions by his superiors.  But at neither place did he find acceptance.  A prophet has no honor in his own country; and for pagan-hearted Florence, though destined to be the theater of his life-drama, Savonarola had as yet no thundrous burden of invective to utter.  Besides, his voice was sharp and thin; his face and person were not prepossessing.  The style of his discourse was adapted to cloisteral disputations, and overloaded with scholastic distinctions.  The great orator had not yet arisen in him.  The friar, with all his dryness and severity, was but too apparent.  With what strange feelings must the youth have trodden the streets of Florence!  In after-days he used to say that he foreknew those