on their texts, he had discovered four separate interpretations for every suggestion of Sacred Writ.  For some of the pregnant utterances of the prophets he found hundreds, pouring forth metaphor and illustration in wild and dazzling profusion of audacious, uncouth imagery.  The flame which began to smoulder in him at San Gemignano burst forth into a blaze at Brescia, in 1486.  Savonarola was now aged thirty-four.  ’Midway upon the path of life’ he opened the Book of Revelation:  he figured to the people of Brescia the four-and-twenty elders rising to denounce the sins of Italy, and to declare the calamities that must ensue.  He pictured to them their city flowing with blood.  His voice, which now became the interpreter of his soul, in its resonance and earnestness and piercing shrillness, thrilled his hearers with strange terror.  Already they believed his prophecy; and twenty-six years later, when the soldiers of Gaston de Foix slaughtered six thousand souls in the streets of Brescia, her citizens recalled the Apocalyptic warnings of the Dominican monk.

As Savonarola is now launched upon his vocation of prophecy, this is the right moment to describe his personal appearance and his style of preaching.  We have abundant material for judging what his features were, and how they flashed beneath the storm of inspiration.[1] Fra Bartolommeo, one of his followers, painted a profile of him in the character of S. Peter Martyr.  This shows all the benignity and grace of expression which his stern lineaments could assume.  It is a picture of the sweet and gentle nature latent within the fiery arraigner of his nation at the bar of God.  In contemporary medals the face appears hard, keen, uncompromising, beneath its heavy cowl.  But the noblest portrait is an intaglio engraved by Giovanni della Corniole, now to be seen in the Uffizzi at Florence.  Of this work Michael Angelo, himself a disciple of Savonarola, said that art could go no further.  We are therefore justified in assuming that the engraver has not only represented faithfully the outline of Savonarola’s face, but has also indicated his peculiar expression.  A thick hood covers the whole head and shoulders.  Beneath it can be traced the curve of a long and somewhat flat skull, rounded into extraordinary fullness at the base and side.  From a deeply sunken eye-socket emerges, scarcely seen, but powerfully felt, the eye that blazed with lightning.  The nose is strong, prominent, and aquiline, with wide nostrils, capable of terrible dilation under the stress of vehement emotion.  The mouth has full, compressed, projecting lips.  It is large, as if made for a torrent of eloquence:  it is supplied with massive muscles, as if to move with energy and calculated force and utterance.  The jawbone is hard and heavy; the cheekbone emergent:  between the two the flesh is hollowed, not so much with the emaciation of monastic vigils as with the athletic exercise of wrestlings in the throes of prophecy.  The face, on the whole,