streets and squares were destined to be the scene of his labors.  But then, voiceless, powerless, without control of his own genius, without the consciousness of his prophetic mission, he brooded alone and out of harmony with the beautiful and mundane city.  The charm of the hills and gardens of Valdarno, the loveliness of Giotto’s tower, the amplitude of Brunelleschi’s dome—­these may have sunk deep into his soul.  And the subtle temper of the Florentine intellect must have attracted his own keen spirit by a secret sympathy.  For Florence erelong became the city of his love, the first-born of his yearnings.

In the cloisters of San Marco, enriched with splendid libraries by the liberality of the Medicean princes, he was at peace.  The walls of that convent had recently been decorated with frescoes by Fra Angelico, even as a man might crowd the leaves of a missal with illuminations.  Among these Savonarola meditated and was happy.  But in the pulpit and in contact with the holiday folk of Florence he was ill at ease.  Lorenzo de’ Medici overshadowed the whole city.  Lorenzo, in whom the pagan spirit of the Renaissance, the spirit of free culture, found a proper incarnation, was the very opposite of Savonarola, who had already judged the classical revival by its fruits, and had conceived a spiritual resurrection for his country.  At Florence a passionate love of art and learning—­the enthusiasm which prompted men to spend their fortunes upon MSS. and statues, the sensibility to beauty which produced the masterworks of Donatello and Ghiberti, the thirst for knowledge which burned in Pico and Poliziano and Ficino—­existed side by side with impudent immorality, religious deadness, cold contempt for truth, and cynical admiration of successful villainy.  Both the good and the evil which flourished on this fertile soil so luxuriantly were combined in the versatile genius of the merchant prince, whose policy it was to stifle freedom by caressing the follies, vices, and intellectual tastes of his people.

The young Savonarola was as yet no match for Lorenzo.  And whither could he look for help?  The reform of morals he so ardently desired was not to be expected from the Church.  Florence well knew that Sixtus had plotted to murder the Medici before the altar at the moment of the elevation of the Host.  Excommunicated for a deed of justice after the failure of this Popish plot, the city had long been at war with the pontiff.  If anywhere it was in the cells of the philosophers, in that retreat where Ficino burned his lamp to Plato, in that hall where the Academy crowned their master’s bust with laurels, that the more sober-minded citizens found ghostly comfort and advice.  But from this philosophy the fervent soul of Savonarola turned with no less loathing, and with more contempt, than from the Canti Carnascialeschi and Aristophanic pageants of Lorenzo, which made Florence at Carnival time affect the fashions of Athens during the Dionysia.  It is true that Italy owed much to the elevated theism developed by Platonic students.  While the humanists were exalting pagan license, and while the Church was teaching the worst kinds of immorality, the philosophers kept alive in cultivated minds a sense of God.