the Signoria to let him have such of the MSS. as he could find for the library of S. Marco.  The honour of such a person is perhaps not worth discussing, but we may remind ourselves what Cosimo had done for S. Marco, and how he had built the library there.  In 1508 the friars turned these stolen goods into money, selling them back to Cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici, who was soon to be Leo X, who carried them to Rome.  Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici, later Clement VII, presented Leo’s collection to the Laurentian Library, which he had bidden Michelangelo to rebuild.  This was interrupted by the unfortunate business of 1527, and it was not till Cosimo I came that the library was finished.  Perhaps the most precious thing here is the Pandects of Justinian, taken by the Pisans from Amalfi in 1135, and seized by the Florentines when they took Pisa in 1406.  Amalfi prized these above everything she possessed, Pisa was ready to defend them with her life, Florence spent hundreds of thousands of florins to possess herself of them—­for in them was thought to lie the secret of the law of Rome.  Who knows what Italy, under the heel of the barbarian, does not owe to these faded pages, and through Italy the world?  They were, as it were, the symbol of Latin civilisation in the midst of German barbarism.  Here too is that most ancient Virgil which the French stole in 1804.  Here is Petrarch’s Horace and a Dante transcribed by Villani; and, best of all, the only ancient codex in the world of what remains to us of Aeschylus, of what is left of Sophocles.  It is in such a place that we may best recognise the true greatness of the abused Medici.  Tyrants they may have been, but when the mob was tyrant it satisfied itself with destroying what they with infinite labour had gathered together for the advancement of learning, the civilisation of the world.  What, then, was that Savonarola whom all have conspired to praise, whose windy prophecies, whose blasphemous cursings men count as so precious?  In truth in his fashion he was but a tyrant too—­a tyrant, and a poor one, and therefore the more dangerous, the more disastrous.  To the Medici we owe much of what is most beautiful in Florence—­the loveliest work of Botticelli, of Brunellesco, of Donatello, of Lippo Lippi, of Michelangelo, and the rest, to say nothing of such a priceless collection of books and MSS. as this.  Is, then, the work of Marsilio Ficino nothing, the labours of a thousand forgotten humanists?  What do we owe to Savonarola?  He burnt the pictures which to his sensual mind suggested its own obscenity; he stole the MSS., and no doubt would have destroyed them too, to write instead his own rhetorical and extraordinary denunciations of what he did not understand.  Who can deny that when he proposed to give freedom to Florence he was dreaming of a new despotism, the despotism, if not of himself, of that Jesus whom he believed had inspired him, and on whom he turned in his rage?  That he was brave we know, but so was Cataline; that he believed