give him absolution for his sins--in a man of less high place they might
perhaps have been called crimes--the Dominican, Giralamo Francesco
Savonarola.

It was not, however, without an inward fear, against which the praises of
his friends availed nothing, that the pleasure-seeker and usurper awaited
that severe and gloomy preacher by whose word's all Florence was stirred,
and on whose pardon henceforth depended all his hope far another world.

Indeed, Savonarola was one of those men of stone, coming, like the statue
of the Commandante, to knock at the door of a Don Giovanni, and in the
midst of feast and orgy to announce that it is even now the moment to
begin to think of Heaven. He had been barn at Ferrara, whither his
family, one of the most illustrious of Padua, had been called by Niccolo,
Marchese d'Este, and at the age of twenty-three, summoned by an
irresistible vocation, had fled from his father's house, and had taken
the vows in the cloister of Dominican monks at Florence. There, where he
was appointed by his superiors to give lessons in philosophy, the young
novice had from the first to battle against the defects of a voice that
was both harsh and weak, a defective pronunciation, and above all, the
depression of his physical powers, exhausted as they were by too severe
abstinence.

Savonarala from that time condemned himself to the most absolute
seclusion, and disappeared in the depths of his convent, as if the slab
of his tomb had already fallen over him. There, kneeling on the flags,
praying unceasingly before a wooden crucifix, fevered by vigils and
penances, he soon passed out of contemplation into ecstasy, and began to
feel in himself that inward prophetic impulse which summoned him to
preach the reformation of the Church.