Stor. vol. i. p. 112), describing what happened at Florence in 1514:  ’There appeared in Santa Croce a Frate Francesco da Montepulciano, very young, who rebuked vice with severity, and affirmed that God had willed to scourge Italy, especially Florence and Rome, in sermons so terrible that the audience kept crying with floods of tears, Misericordia! The whole people were struck dumb with horror, for those who could not hear the friar by reason of the crowd, listened with no less fear to the reports of others.  At last he preached a sermon so awful that the congregation stood like men who had lost their senses; for he promised to reveal upon the third day how and from what source he had received this prophecy.  However, when he left the pulpit, worn out and exhausted, he was seized with an illness of the lungs, which soon put an end to his life.  Pitti goes on to relate the frenzy of revivalism excited by this monk’s preaching, which had roused all the old memories of Savonarola in Florence.  It became necessary for the Bishop to put down the devotion by special edicts, while the Medici endeavored to distract the minds of the people by tournaments and public shows.

[1] See Prato and Burigozzo, Arch.  Stor. vol. iii. pp. 357, 431.  It is here worth noticing that Siena, the city of civil discord, was also the city of frenetic piety.  The names of S. Caterina, S. Bernardino, and Bernardo Tolomei occur to the mind.

    [2] Storia Fiorintina, vol. i. p. 87.

    [3] Arch.  Stor. vol. iii. p. 443.

    [4] Burigozzo, pp. 485-89.

Enough has now been quoted from various original sources to illustrate the feverish recurrences of superstitious panics in Italy during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.  It will be observed, from what has been said about John of Vicenza, Jacopo del Bussolaro, S. Bernardino, Roberto da Lecce, Giovanni della Marca, and Fra Capistrano, that Savonarola was by no means an extraordinary phenomenon in Italian history.  Combining the methods and the aims of all these men, and remaining within the sphere of their conceptions, he impressed a role, which had been often played in the chief Italian towns, with the stamp of his peculiar genius.  It was a source of weakness to him in his combat with Alexander VI., that he could not rise above the monastic ideal of the prophet which prevailed in Italy, or grasp one of those regenerative conceptions which formed the motive force of the Reformation.  The inherent defects of all Italian revivals, spasmodic in their paroxysms, vehement while they lasted, but transient in their effects, are exhibited upon a tragic scale by Savonarola.  What strikes us, after studying the records of these movements in Italy, is chiefly their want of true mental energy.  The momentary effect produced in great cities like Florence, Milan, Verona, Pavia, Bologna, and Perugia is quite out of proportion to the slight intellectual power exerted