thing miraculous, looked trembling to the morrow, a tempest raged without in the excited city. The Piagnoni hid their heads, broken down in heart and hope, struck with a disappointment as unreasonable as their expectations. The other factions stormed through the streets in triumphant riot. They, too, had been wound up to a pitch of awed and wondering expectation around that gigantic pile; and in the revulsion of feeling which followed, they gave full scope to all the scorn and hatred with which they regarded the prophet, whose instructions had been too hard for them. If he had been a prophet, would he not have proved it by fire and miracle? they cried in triumph; and the troubled Piagnoni could give no answer. Next morning, which was Palm Sunday, rose in quiet over the agitated town. Once more Fra Girolamo stood mournful in the pulpit of St Mark's; he felt that his hour, the hour to which he had so long looked forward, was almost come, and for the last time gave his benediction to the alarmed people. That very evening his enemies took advantage of a disturbance at the Duomo to carry out their intentions. As soon as the spirit of riot was up, the crowd rushed to San Marco; there, after a gallant but fruitless resistance made by some of the citizens who were in the church at the time, and by some few sturdy monks who could not forget that they were men, nor refrain from striking a blow for their leader, the besieged convent was taken, and Savonarola, Domenico, and Fra Silvestro, were carried forth prisoners, through the insults of the crowd. The three friars were cast into the dungeons of the Palazzo Vecchio, each by himself. They were put to the torture through lingering days of misery. It was the Valley of the Shadow of Death into which they thus entered; and the saddest chapter of the tragedy was to be enacted there.

Savonarola was worn with the

agonies of life, with fastings, watchings, conflicts, and that care of all the affairs of Florence which had lain heavy on his hands for many a day. The ordeal to which he was now subjected was one for which he was specially disqualified. His frame was sensitive, his imagination ardent. In the horrors of "the question" his strong spirit yielded. He became delirious in his agony, and assented wildly to the suggestions of his persecutors. What he really confessed no one can now discover, for the record of the examination was confessedly falsified; but though his persecutors could not wring from the fainting, raving, exhausted monk any acknowledgment of evil motive, they drew from him in his delirium some wild confession that he had deceived himself, and that it was not God who had spoken, but his own fancy. His enemies made all they could of the cries of his misery-they corrupted the record, and published it to show the people how they had been deceived. His companions went through the same terrible process. Brave Domenico, strong of frame and unappalled of heart, bore, like the heroic soul he was, a still harder torture than that ordeal of fire which had been denied him, and, constant to the last, uttered his testimony for his master with a noble simplicity, unshaken in his faith even by learning that his master himself had lost heart. The ecstatic Silvestro failed still more sadly than Savonarola, and, with the instinct of a weak mind, tried to exculpate himself by casting blame upon his superior. It is the most melancholy episode in all the story. Little was gained by all this, however, for the ends of the Signoria. They had nothing to report to the Pope of guilt confessed; but they had the satisfaction of grieving the disciples of Savonarola in Florence by the thought that their leader had denied his own divine commission; and perhaps of planting some last thorns, bitterest of all that had wounded

him in his way, in the short but painful path that now remained.

But when the friar was left in peace in his melancholy cell to await the merciful death which should free his worn and wounded frame from all the tortures of earth, his heart and courage returned to him. Perhaps he was himself unconscious of all that had been said in his name; at least no shame, no excitement of self-defence seem to have confused his last thoughts. Alone and solitary, deserted by his friends, cast off by the frightened friars of San Marco, who by this time had changed with the tide, and were making a cowardly peace with the Pope, Fra Girolamo took his pen once more into the trembling fingers, which had been rendered all but useless by the cruel torture of the rope, and wrote his last message to the world-not a message of selfvindication. Such thoughts had fled from the mind of the martyr in his last hours. "In thee, Lord, do I put my trust," pondered the monk in his prison; and with a hand wrung by torture, and a beart out of which all the pangs of earth were banished by the shadow of death, interwove his solemn meditations with the pathetic strain of the Miserere, the psalm of sinners. "Sorrow has pitched his camp around me; he has taken possession of my heart, and never ceases, day nor night, to attack me with the clang of arms. My friends fight under his standard and are become my enemies," is the cry out of his afflicted soul, “but I will turn me to heavenly things, and Hope will come to my rescue.' Thus the forlorn heart pursues its pathetic argument, pondering in faith and sorrow the mysteries of salvation. It would be a profanation of this last solemn death-song of the great Italian to enter into any discussion whether or not the doctrines of the Reformation and of justification by faith are to be found in it, as Luther asserts. Professor Villari says no, without apparently any very clear knowledge what the principles of

the Reformation were. But the last meditation of Fra Girolamo contains no thought of any mere doctrine. He was going to die as he had lived, in the faith of Jesus Christ who died for him, as many a saint has lived and died in Catholic cloister and Protestant church, without dream of controversy. Little doubt that the worn and faithful soldier held fast, with whatever mingling of human fancy his faith was capable, by the Lord, in whose name he had fought all his battles. To explore the last utterance of his broken heart in search of Protestant doctrines is no office for the spectator who stands by with awe and reverence to behold that final triumph. As he mused then he had preached all his life. It was no new sound which the Christian preacher rang with his dying breath upon that silver trumpet which he was to sound no more on earth;-a primitive Catholic wail out of the battle-ground of earth, in the conflict where Hope and Grief contended to the deatha forlorn but dauntless cry of that Name above all names which is to all Christians the sole charm and hope of victory. Such was the last utterance of Girolamo the monk. He stood in a region beyond controversy-a region in which, between Catholic saint and Protestant martyr, separation or difference can exist no more.

Only one other scene remained. On the 22d of May, in the evening, the three prisoners were informed that their fate was decided, and that next morning they were to die. Savonarola received the news with unmoved calm. The brave Domenico, for his part, heard it gladly, and hastened to write, with his racked and almost nerveless hands, a joyful, affectionate letter to his brothers. "Say for us the usual masses," said this dauntless and simple soul, "and where I am going I will do as much for you." Presently a dark figure, covered with such a hood as the traveller to-day still meets in the streets of Florence concealing

the faces of the brethren of the Misericordia, entered the cell of Fra Girolamo-a benevolent visitor, whose office was to comfort the dying. By means of this pitying spectator the prior of San Marco was permitted a last interview with his companions. The three met solemnly, with full hearts. The Frati, both of them, had heard that their leader had been false to his own pretensions, but no doubt of him seems to have been possible in his presence. They threw themselves into his arms, at his feet, and begged for his blessing. In that hour the weak Silvestro had regained his faith; in presence of his master even the feeble soul found courage. That night Savonarola laid his weary head on the knees of his veiled visitor, whose name was Nicolini, and slept, dreaming, and smiling in his dream like a child. When he woke he opened his heart to the awed and wondering stranger. He told him of woes that were yet to come on Florence, and how a pope whose name should be Clement would bring misery on the city. This was the last prophecy; and the anxious popular imagination laid it up, and doubtless added to it, after the fact, many a faithful particular of accomplished misery. Woe and lamentation had been the burden of the friar's ministry all his life; and there could be no surer proof than his approaching execution that the scourge had not yet done its full work in the city for which he had laboured so faithfully and well.

Early next morning the three friars again met in the chapel of the Palazzo, and Savonarola was permitted to administer to them their last communion. Then out of the cold twilight of their prison, for the first time since that April night when they were dragged from their convent, the solemn three went forth into the dazzling sunshine of an Italian May, into air so sweet that it is joy to breathe that purest lymph of nature. They were men in the prime and strength of life,

untouched by time, at the age when it is hardest to die. This great act, however, was now all that remained to them. Not long was the last journey. Before them in the brilliant piazza, flooded with early sunshine, was the scaffold with its three gibbets, lowering black over a troubled sea of dark faces-a crowd awed out of all sound. A few steps from the door of the Palazzo they stood before the bishop, once a friend of San Marco, who had the hard office of unfrocking and degrading the great Dominican. Here their robes, the dress of their order, to which so many sacred associations attached, were taken from the monks. The troubled bishop took Savonarola by the arm, and, too much disturbed to know what he was saying, pronounced, faltering, his terrible sentence: I separate thee from the Church militant-and triumphant," said the agitated priest. Then the calm voice of Fra Girolamo startled the breathless crowd: "Not triumphant; that is not in your power," said he who stood upon the threshold of the world unseen. Then unfrocked, in their short tunics, with bare feet and pinioned_arms, they proceeded to their end, the brave Domenico chanting in a whisper as he went the noble thanksgivings of the Te Deum. "In what state of mind do you endure this martyrdom?" asked a priest, curious, as human creatures ever will be, to ascertain the mind of the dying. The Lord has suffered as much for me," said Savonarola. They were his last words. Thereafter he looked on in silence while his two brothers, faithful in death, died like men before his eyes. Then he mounted the fatal ladder, and, pausing there abstracted, looked round upon the breathless silent multitude an unspeakable gaze of human wonder and anguish over the ingratitude and blindness of

man.

Then he too died for his Lord, who had died for him. A shudder and pang of horror ran through the multitude when they

saw that again there was to be no miracle, and that their wretched hands had done what no power of man could undo. So ended the great and lofty tragedy; cruel fire, kindled underneath the scaffold, consumed the worn frame which an hour before had enshrined the highest heart in Italy; no false prophet, no demagogue, no meddling friar now;-already a holy martyr, whose relics were precious, whose name was sacred. They threw his ashes into Arno, to make an end of Savonarola: but already worshipping women, mournful men, had gathered the scraps of his tunic, the drops of his blood, to keep for ever and ever; and the name and fame of the Prophet of Italy had taken the place which it has held for centuries, long after the miserable brawls and brawlers to whom he owed his death had died into native darkness out of the memory of man.

Such was the life and death of Girolamo Savonarola, the saviour and martyr of Florence- a man before his age only in so far as the pure, the generous, the heroic, the men who aim at an ideal Christian commonwealth in this burdened and guilty earth, always are -for the rest a real medieval figure, too vehement, too picturesque, too daring, for any other scene than that he lived in. He died with hands pure of any selfish stain, having sought nothing but to establish Christ as King of Florence, and to drive out from the temple, as his Master drove them, the merchandise and the impurity. He died, and the next generation worshipped his name, wrote his life. annotated his books, lived

upon commentaries and treatises concerning Fra Girolamo, as Italian enthusiasts will. But though there were many to burn tapers before the picture of those stern, kind, homely features, and bow in semiworship to the cowled head, with its deep eyes of prophetic insight, there was nobody to keep alive the great work of Reformation which he had begun. But Martin Luther had been born by that time, and Germany had its day of glory just beginning to dawn out of the stormy skies. Now, once more, another generation of Italians, much unconscious, as Villari quaintly reveals, of Martin Luther, have again begun to collect the relics and comment on the life of the illustrious monk. San Marco itself once more takes up the memory and glory of its greatest friar, and metaphorical violets perfume the air in the wide piazza, where many a stirring scene has been since then, offered to the memory of Savonarola. But whether this great progenitor of Reform may yet have any successor in the Italian Church, it would be rash to say. Much dropped work from past centuries lies upon Italian hands to finish; in that same Florence, for example, the façade of the cathedral which Brunelleschi built and Dante loved, and Fra Girolamo reigned and preached in. It will be harder to follow the friar of St Mark's in the nineteenth century through that thorny way to perfection which he marked out over rock and brake with bleeding feet in the fifteenth, than to replace with dainty marble and exquisite design the rude mask which now diminishes the beauty of Santa Maria of the Flowers.

ALTHOUGH this letter is dated Cracow, it must not be supposed that I am still there, but merely that the notes which I have here put into a connected shape were collected last month in that city and the neighbourhood, to which I had been attracted by the interesting events of which Poland was then the theatre. Those events possessed the merit, not uncommon to revolutionary movements, of being altogether sudden and unforeseen, with the incidental advantage of being very little appreciated or understood in this country. The insurrection has, indeed, taken not merely England but all Europe by surprise. We all knew that the Continent contained a good many powder-magazines, and that trains were laid in all sorts of directions, but nobody expected the first explosion to take place in the Russian Empire. So sudden was the shock, and so unexpected in its immediate effects, that politicians of every class were disconcerted, and emperors, statesmen, and revolutionists are still anxiously waiting for the smoke to clear away. Whether we are to have a whole series of still greater explosions, or whether the horizon will slowly reveal itself, and leave only a heap of blackened debris called Poland, is still a problem. The wisest heads did not foresee the Polish outbreak, and they can scarcely venture to predict its consequences. In England, where the ignorance of European politics is most profound, we had long ceased to think of Poland as an oppressed nationality, and disbelieved in the vitality of the patriotic sentiment among the inhabitants. In France, where we have only to do with the opinions of one man, that illustrious individual had studiously ignored the existence of the Polish nationality. It did not appear in his 'Nouvelles Cartes

CRACOW, April 1863.

d'Europe,' was not discussed in his fettered press, and was altogether too inconvenient an illustration of the leading Napoleonic idea to be alluded to. The Franco-Russian alliance was working out his Eastern policy to the satisfaction of the Emperor; and when the crash came in Poland and blew it out of sight, His Majesty was probably a good deal more astonished and very little less disgusted than the Autocrat of All the Russias himself. Up to the present moment, it must be admit ted that the Polish insurrection has been a source of satisfaction to no one.

However much the British public may sympathise with oppressed nationalities, a revolution which is likely to lead to a European war can only be considered in England in the light of a nuisance, particularly at a moment when our relations with America are in the last degree critical. Our allies can regard it with no greater favour; the Emperor's combinations have been thwarted, and he did not desire a Polish question to be added to those at present at issue in Mexico and Italy. Austria, just inaugurating reforms and setting her house in order, is interrupted in the middle of her laudable efforts, and, afraid to advance or retreat, is "marking time" in her usual timid and uncertain fashion. An infatuated king and obstinate minister in Prussia have seized upon the occasion to rush in where angels would have feared to tread, and their Polish policy has sunk them in the sight of Europe to the level they already occupied in the eyes of their own people. In the kingdom itself the insurrection has been considered a misfortune. The nobles wished to postpone it for at least two years; the party of action had fixed it for this summer. one could have anticipated a revolution in mid-winter; and even those who desired to precipitate the

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