ABSTRACT
The contrast between the private and the pulpit manner of Girolamo Savonarola was so marked as to present two distinct personalities and to raise the question which was the real one. The Roman tradition had been broken by two calamities, the barbarian invasions and the effeminizing influence of Christianity; and they seemed to be repeated by the coincidence of the French invasion and the evangelical experiment of Savonarola. Savonarola profited by the lull to publish a defence of his position and to pour a smooth flow of reason on the dispute. The intractable spirit of Savonarola was an insistent provocation to his own. He followed Nature, for whom self-satisfaction was the only law and the principle of fertility. Amid the dull thud of bullets, the guttural shouts of the German, the hoarse murmur of prayers, the vague silhouettes moving like spectres in a mustering pandemonium, Savonarola was unheard.
