that pressed upon him, became more irritable day by day.  Vision succeeded vision; trance followed upon trance; agonies of dejection were suddenly transformed into outbursts of magnificent and soul-sustaining enthusiasm.  It was no wonder if, passing as he had done from the discipline of the cloister to the dictatorship of a republic, he should make extravagant mistakes.  The tension of this abnormal situation in the city grew to be excessive, and cool thinkers predicted that Savonarola’s position would become untenable.  Parties began to form and gather to a head.  The followers of the monk, by far the largest section of the people, received the name of Piagnoni or Frateschi.  The friends of the Medici, few at first and cautious, were called Bigi.  The opponents of Savonarola and of the Medici, who hated his theocracy, but desired to see an oligarchy and not a tyranny in Florence, were known as the Arrabbiati.

The discontent which germinated in Florence displayed itself in Rome.  Alexander found it intolerable to be assailed as Antichrist by a monk who had made himself master of the chief Italian republic.  At first he used his arts of blandishment and honeyed words in order to lure Savonarola to Rome.  The friar refused to quit Florence.  Then Alexander suspended him from preaching.  Savonarola obeyed, but wrote at the same time to Charles VIII. denouncing his indolence and calling upon him to reform the Church.  At the request of the Florentine Republic, though still suffering from the Pope’s interdict, he then resumed his preaching.  Alexander sought next to corrupt the man he could not intimidate.  To the suggestion that a Cardinal’s hat might be offered him, Savonarola replied that he preferred the red crown of martyrdom.  Ascending the pulpit of the Duomo in 1496, he preached the most fiery of all his Lenten courses.  Of this series of orations Milman writes:  ’His triumphal career began with the Advent of 1494 on Haggai and the Psalms.  But it is in the Careme of 1496 on Amos and Zechariah that the preacher girds himself to his full strength, when he had attained his full authority, and could not but be conscious that there was a deep and dangerous rebellion brooding in the hearts of the hostile factions at Florence, and when already ominous rumors began to be heard from Rome.  He that would know the power, the daring, the oratory of Savonarola, must study this volume.’[1]

    [1] These sermons were printed from the notes taken by Lorenzo
    Violi in one volume at Venice, 1534.

Very terrific indeed are the denunciations contained in these discourses—­denunciations fulminated without disguise against the Pope and priests of Rome, against the Medici, against the Florentines themselves, in whom the traces of rebellion were beginning to appear.  Mingled with these vehement invectives, couched in Savonarola’s most impassioned style and heightened by his most impressive imagery, are political harangues and polemical arguments against the Pope.  The