But the monk, nourished on the Bible and S. Thomas, valued this confusion of spirits and creeds in a chaos of indiscriminate erudition, at a small price.  He had the courage in the fifteenth century at Florence to proclaim that the philosophers were in hell, and that an old woman knew more of saving faith than Plato.  Savonarola and Lorenzo were opposed as champions of two hostile principles alike emergent from the very life of the Renaissance:  paganism reborn in the one, the spirit of the gospel in the other.  Both were essentially modern; for it was the function of the Renaissance to restore to the soul of man its double heritage of the classic past and Christian liberty, freeing it from the fetters which the Middle Ages had forged.  Not yet, however, were Lorenzo and Savonarola destined to clash.  The obscure friar at this time was preaching to an audience of some thirty persons in San Lorenzo, while Poliziano and all the fashion of the town crowded to the sermons of Fra Mariano da Genezzano in Santo Spirito.  This man flattered the taste of the moment by composing orations on the model of Ficino’s addresses to the Academy, and by complimenting Christianity upon its similarity to Platonism.  Who could then have guessed that beneath the cowl of the harsh-voiced Dominican, his rival, burned thoughts that in a few years would inflame Florence with a conflagration powerful enough to destroy the fabric of the Medicean despotism?

From Florence, where he had met with no success, Savonarola was sent to San Gemignano, a little town on the top of a high hill between Florence and Siena.  We now visit San Gemignano in order to study some fading frescoes of Gozzoli and Ghirlandajo, or else for the sake of its strange feudal towers, tall pillars of brown stone, crowded together within the narrow circle of the town walls.  Very beautiful is the prospect from these ramparts on a spring morning, when the song of nightingales and the scent of acacia flowers ascend together from the groves upon the slopes beneath.  The gray Tuscan landscape for scores and scores of miles all round melts into blueness, like the blueness of the sky, flecked here and there with wandering cloud-shadows.  Let those who pace the grass-grown streets of the hushed city remember that here the first flash of authentic genius kindled in Savonarola’s soul.  Here for the first time he prophesied:  ’The church will be scourged, then regenerated, and this quickly.’  These are the celebrated three conclusions, the three points to which Savonarola in all his prophetic utterances adhered.

But not yet had he fully entered on his vocation.  His voice was weak; his style uncertain; his soul, we may believe, still wavering between strange dread and awful joy, as he beheld, through many a backward rolling mist of doubt, the mantle of the prophets descend upon him.  Already he had abandoned the schoolmen for the Bible.  Already he had learned by heart each verse of the Old and New Testaments.  Pondering