Born in Ferrara in 1452, the grandson of a famous doctor of Padua, Girolamo Savonarola had entered the Dominican Order at Bologna when he was twenty-two years old, finding the world but a wretched place, and the wickedness of men more than he could bear.  Something of this strange and almost passionate pessimism remained with him his whole life long.  In 1481 he had been sent to the convent of S. Marco, in Florence, when Lorenzo de’ Medici had been at the head of affairs for some twelve years.  The Pazzi conspiracy, in which Giuliano de’ Medici lost his life, had come in 1478, and Lorenzo was fixed more firmly than ever in the affections of the people.  Simonetta had been borne like a dead goddess through the streets of the city to burial; Lorenzo was already busy with those carnival songs which, as some thought, were written to corrupt the people:  the Renaissance had come.  “Gladius Domini super terram cite et velociter,” thought Savonarola, unable to understand that life from which he had fled into the cloister.  It was the first voice that had been raised against the resurrection of the Gods, but at that moment Martin Luther was lying in his mother’s arms, while his father worked in the mines at Eisleben:  the Reaction was already born.

On a Latin city such as Florence was, Savonarola at first made little or no impression; too often the friars had prophesied evil for no cause, wandering through every little city in Italy denouncing the Signori.  It was in San Gemignano, even to-day the most medieval of Tuscan cities, a place of towers and winding narrow ways, that Savonarola first won a hearing; and so it was not till nine years after his first coming to her that Florence seems to have listened to his prophecy, when, in August 1490, in S. Marco he began to preach on the Revelation of St. John the Divine.  It was a programme half political, half spiritual, that he suggested to those who heard him, the reformation of the Church and the fear of a God who had been forgotten but who would not forget.  In the spring of the year following, so great were the crowds who flocked to hear his half-political discourses that he had to preach in the Duomo.  There unmistakably we are face to face with a political agitator.  “God intends to punish Lorenzo Magnifico,—­yes, and his friends too”; and when, a little later, he was made prior of S. Marco, he refused to receive Lorenzo in the house his grandfather had built.  In the following year Lorenzo died; Savonarola, as the tale goes, refusing him absolution unless he would restore liberty to the people of Florence.  Consider the position.  How could Lorenzo restore that which he had never stolen away, that which had, in truth, never had any real existence?  He was without office, without any technical right to government, merely the first among the citizens of what, in name at least, was a Republic.  If he was a tyrant, he ruled by the will of the people, not by divine right, a thing unknown among the Signori of Italy, nor by