"Usefulness of the Sciences," he enlarged, by the way, on his own idea of poetry, its true sources, ends, and beauties, as contrasted with the false principles and immoral practices of so many poets ancient and modern. Other pamphlets, mainly on religious subjects, followed from time to time; last of all his "Triumph of the Cross,' which, beginning with well-reasoned proofs of God's existence, went on to discuss, point by point, the whole body of Christian doctrine, as held by the Roman Church, and wound up with an able defence of that doctrine against all claims put forth in behalf of any other form of religious belief. Amidst all his flights of mysticism, his bold graspings at the inward truth of things, Savonarola never for a moment lost himself in a maze of theological doubts, never cast aside the least of those dogmas which made up the ruling creed of medieval Christendom.

Meanwhile, however, clouds, had begun to gather both round Florence and her spiritual ruler. The Medici still had their partisans in a city at all times famous for its factions. Beside these were soon arrayed an evergrowing band of those who kicked against the harsh discipline enforced by the saintly-minded friar. Nor could Pope Alexander help sharing largely in the grudge borne by the Tuscan priesthood towards the unsparing assailant of all priestly vices and shortcomings. Even in 1495, he had shown his bias by an attempt to silence the bold Dominican. But his hatred had to keep itself unsatisfied for better times. Savonarola was left free to preach more of his terrible sermons, to go forth and greet the French King with solemn reproaches for his treachery towards the Florentines, his disobedience to the Divine commands. The return of Charles VIII. to France exposed Florence to new dangers. Backed by Rome, Lombardy, and Venice, Piero de' Medici set cat with his troops on the road to his native city. Roused betimes to their duty by the fierce speeches of Savonarola, the Florentines took care to forestal the invader; and Piero, cursing the slackness of his allies, withdrew to his Roman shelter, there to brood over past mishaps and plot schemes of future revenge.

The French having gone their way, Alexander again bethought him of silencing a preacher whose sermons teemed with passages directly or indirectly condemning the Borgia; whose very power over the Florentines seemed like a standing protest against the wickedness that reared its crest in Rome. In July, 1495, Savonarola was bidden, in words of honey, to go and talk with the Pope in his own city. In excuse, the friar pleaded his slow recovery from a wasting illness, his fear of enemies who were daily plotting against his life, and his earnest desire to see the new Republic fairly started on the way to lasting good. The Pope answered graciously enough. In good truth the friar needed rest alike from preaching and all study. A farewell sermon, from lips that trembled with weakness, scarce held in check by the glow of a passing excitement, told his hearers how sorely his health had suffered from much toiling in their behalf. In a month he hoped to meet them again, but meanwhile his life, already shortened by past efforts, hung upon his abstinence from all work.

In September, however, another letter came, addressed to the Franciscans of the Holy Cross, but meant in effect for Savonarola. His answer was that course of sermons which united Florence against the attempt of Piero. In November came a third letter forbidding him to preach at all. The still obedient friar bowed his head to a doom which served at any rate to rest his weakened frame, and enabled him to soothe his family in their misfortunes with letters full of deep compassion and earnest longing for the life to come. Sorrowing with them in all their sorrows, he prayed his mother to nerve her heart by faith against all that might happen to her children-"so that if I should chance to suffer death, you may not take it too much to heart; if I should fall, you also may not fall."

In the Lent of 1496, Savonarola was once more in the pulpit, thanks to the powerful pleading of his Florentine friends. Nay, more, he was offered the red hat of a cardinal, if he would only lower his tone. To this proffer of a shameful bribe, he gave his only answer in the sermons on Amos and

Zechariah, preached that very season, amid circumstances more than commonly exciting. Fresh rows of seats had to be put up in the great cathedral, and the preacher set forth from his convent, guarded by a body of armed friends, while other companies lined the streets, ready for the first signs of any hostile movement; for plots against the friar were already brewing among the "malignants," who lacked as yet the power or the boldness to attack him with fairer weapons. In these new sermons he rose to his greatest height. His late submissiveness towards the Pope suddenly turned into a bold defiance of human as matched with divine commands. If the Pope bade him go against the Gospel, it was not the Gospel that should give way. If any one commanded him to leave a city to whose well-being his stay was needful, he would certainly disobey. Hitherto his prudence had kept him silent; but now that good men were growing cool, and wicked men bold, what could he do but speak out The word of the Lord was in his heart, and would utterly consume him, if it came not forth. The keynote thus sounded, he went on Sunday after Sunday, declaiming, like a prophet of old, against the sins of Florence and of Rome, the wicked enmity of the elders, the foolish vanities of the women, the religious hypocrisy of the people at large, who loved only the outward shows and pomps of religious worship; who were good one hour of the day, that they might be wicked the rest of their lives." For the great sins of Rome and of Italy there would come a Scourge upon the land; it should be stricken with a grievous sickness, even unto death. Its princes should be visited with cruel wars; its people wasted by a woeful pestilence. There should not be men enough left to bury the dead, but people with carts would go from house to house, collecting the bodies that they might be burnt in heaps. For himself the day was coming when he too would undergo his doom at the hand of enemies thirsting for his blood.

Of war, indeed, the Florentines were soon to have enough. Pisa was still unconquered; and during that autumn Leghorn, whence Florence drew her

supplies, was closely invested by the soldiers of Maximilian and the fleets of Venice. Sore rent by internal factions, Florence saw famine creeping on her from without. Savonarola was again forbidden to preach by the Holy Father, whose sense of decency had been shocked by stories of the wild pageant wherewith the simple friar had sought to displace the old heathenish carnival. For some weeks the Dominican held his tongue, until the earnest prayers of the Signory brought him again into the pulpit, in the hope of cheering his dismayed and bewildered countrymen. His eloquence was aided by good news from Leghorn, and before the end of November the great danger from without had passed away; the Pope for the moment made no further sign; and the friar's supremacy seemed once more thoroughly assured.

But the storm in his case had only lulled. A second bonfire of vanities, indeed, proclaimed the strength of the friar's influence, and his Lent sermons for 1497 were received with general applause. Piero de' Medici once more failed to enter Florence. But the malignants soon returned to their plotting, and Pope Alexander had not ceased to think of vengeance. In May he issued his bull of excommunication against the friar. The breaking-out of the plague at Florence in June directed men's thoughts for a while to the dangers nearer home; and the friends of Savonarola were still powerful enough to enforce the doom of death on the leaders of another plot, discovered in August, for overthrowing the new republic. In the latter business the friar's own share seems to have been little or naught, while the Papal sentence on himself kept him from performing any public duty during the few weeks the plague lasted. But in October came another letter from the Pope, arraigning "one Jerome Savonarola" for blasphemous and heretical teaching, and sternly forbidding him to preach or lecture even within St. Mark's. Still he shrank from open rebellion, leaving his friends in the Signory to plead his cause at Rome, while from his own cell he issued letters, tracts, and longer treatises to prove his own orthodoxy, and the nullity of Papal sentences in a case like his. Thus

quietly was ending the last year but one of the bold reformer's life, when, on Christmas Day, he once more broke from his self-imposed fetters, and led the solemn services in his own convent before a crowd of assembled Florentines.

Early the next year a friendly Signory pressed him, not in vain, to renew his preachings in the cathedral. Amidst the hootings and stone-throwing of his enemies, he made his way to his old triumphal seat, and discoursed to overflowing crowds, of the great questions threatening his own life and the freedom of his beloved city. His language grew plainer, if not more stirring, than before; he would rather die, he would sooner be sent to hell, than ask for absolution from the sentence unlawfully passed on him by the venal rulers of the church. He was not bound by every order of a Pope, who might act as wickedly, might err as greatly in his judgment, as any other man. His enemies sought his ruin for daring to speak the truth, to bear witness against them, as Paul did against Peter, "when he was to be blamed." But in spite of Pope and Cardinals, nd all who aided them, his doctrine was true; and, if need should arise, the Lord, through him, would work a miracle to enforce it. The last day of the Carnival was signalized by a procession more splendid, by a bonfire larger and more extravagant, than those of former years.

Meanwhile the monk's old enemy, Gennezzano, was inflaming men's minds at Rome against the impious "Man of Ferrara," who called the Pope a broken rod of iron. Again Alexander wrote to the Florentine Signory, commanding them, on pain of an interdict, either to send the Friar in bonds to Rome, or to keep him shut up and silent among themselves. At their request, Savonarola again left his pulpit "for such time as it should please the Lord." Withdrawing to St. Mark's, he still preached at times, to a diminished audience of men alone. In these latter sermons he openly broached the subject of a General Council, which should punish the wicked clergy and depose "a bishop convicted of simony and schism." All men knew at whom this dart was levelled; and the friar

followed up the new move by sending letters to all the princes of Europe, in which he exhorted them to summon a Council for the deposition of a Pope who was no Pope. One of these letters falling into Borgia's hands, raised his fury to the highest pitch.

But the Pope's anger worked less harm for his enemy than the mad zeal of the friar's own followers. One of these, friar Dominic, accepted the challenge of a Franciscan knave or zealot, to test the fact of Savonarola's inspiration, by undergoing the ordeal of fire. A day was appointed, a pile of fire-stuff prepared; five hundred soldiers kept off the wonderloving crowd; a number of volunteer guards surrounded either champion and his friends. At the hour named, the Dominican was ready—was burning to enter the flames in his master's presence, for his master's sake. But the Franciscans hung back. On one pretext after another, their champion put off the critical moment. Time passed. Heavy showers fell upon the wearied people, and still the Franciscan did not appear at his post. At length the Signory forbade the ordeal to go on.

In the midst of a fearful riot, upbraided even by his own followers, Savonarola sadly struggled back to St. Mark's. The spell was broken; the sun of his power was fast setting in black clouds. His bravest partisans were murdered in the streets by ruffians thirsting for his own blood. After a brave but bootless stand, the monastery itself was stormed, and he who had lately been the soul and guiding will of a whole people, was led forth, bound and powerless, a butt for the coarse jeers and cowardly insults of a ruthless fickleminded crowd.

The Pope's joy was very great. All he now desired was to make an example of the Friar in the Holy City itself. But the Florentine rulers had already begun the good work upon the spot. They had their victim tortured and tortured again; but the confessions wrung from him by the exquisite pain of the moment, were as regularly recanted in his calmer hours. At length the proper scoundrel turned up, through whose agency the mass of wild, jarring, and perplexed statements were cooked into a practicable report. After a month's imprisonment, the poor, suffering, yet still un

conquerable friar, was again examined, and again tortured before the Papal Commissioners. The pain that made him false to his true self, was accompanied by the deep mental anguish audible in his cries for God's pardon, for having denied him and the Lord Jesus. It was a sad fall for such a hero; but all men's nerves are not equally proof to bodily torture. At length, after two days of fruitless questioning, the death-warrant was issued on 22nd May, against Jerome and his two disciples, Dominic and Sylvester. Of mere death, however, the sensitive enthusiast had no fears. That night was spent by him in prayer and fasting. Next day, clad only in woollen shirts, the three were led, barefooted, to the place of doom. Savonarola was the last to come under the hangman's care. Wrapt in his own blissful thoughts, he looked for one moment on the sea of unfriendly faces below him, and died without a word. The three bodies were then consigned as they hung to the flames prepared for them at the gallows' foot. The grief of a faithful few was drowned in the dreadful shouts and laughter of a raging multitude. The victims' ashes were then thrown into the Arno, but love and superstition managed to discover relics enough of the martyred saint.

Thus, in his forty-sixth year, died one of the noblest heroes of a race conspicuous for heroic names. A saint of unrivalled purity, a patriot of the most unselfish aims, he fell, in fact, a prey to the political hatred of an unscrupulous faction, to the fierce resentments of an evil Pope and a corrupt priesthood against him who dared, in the character of an orthodox churchman, to denounce their worldly practices and far from Christian lives.

His very nobleness proved his bane; a wicked and perverse generation could not bear the crushing satire embodied in a life so pure, in a faith so deeply grounded. The reform he aimed at was of the heart alone; Rome's religion was good enough for the world, if men would only act up to the doctrine they professed to hold. He would have had them prove their Christianity by leading, as far as they could, the life of Christ. To her own deep disgrace, the Church of Rome slew one of her most loyal champions; a Christian bishop hunted to his death one of those saintly few, whose lives stand out as landmarks in the history of our common Christendom. For, after all deductions, Christians of whatever sect or country_may well be proud of such a man. It matters not that his visions were hysteric, rather than supernatural; that some of his prophecies turned out false; that he believed in dogmas spurned by a Wickliffe or a Luther; that he showed himself weak at last, under the torture which he would have brought to bear against men convicted of certain crimes. Yet these and such like flaws are but the shadow to his many and great virtues. A more unselfish patriot never fell a prey to popular ingratitude. A more earnestminded reformer never paid the penalty for over-taxing his brethren's weakness. Nor need we grudge him our reverent sympathies because, to all seeming, he failed at last. In spite of the new gospel that might makes right, let us rather think of him as we think of the like-minded hero, whose failure at Aspromonte rendered him all the dearer to the hearts of true patriots in every country, where his deeds have hitherto been made known.