mong men. Not only did he converse with ease and
readiness on every conceivable topic--not only did strophe after
strophe of musical verse flow from his lips with the facility of
an _improvisatore_, but he possessed the supreme art of moving the
multitude by an eloquence born of his own impassioned soul. While that
suave voice rung in men's ears, it was impossible not to be convinced
by his arguments. As a patriot, he worshiped Italy. His fervid
imagination reveled in her natural beauties--art, music, history,
poetry. He worshiped Italy, and he devoted his whole life to what he
conceived to be her good.

Marescotti was no atheist; he was a religious reformer, sincerely and
profoundly pious, and conscientious to the point of honor. Indeed, his
conscience was so sensitive, that he had been known to confess two
and three times on the same day. The cavaliere called him an atheist
because he was a believer in Savonarola, and because he positively
refused to bind himself to any priestly dogma, or special form
of worship whatever. But he had never renounced the creed of his
ancestors. The precepts of Savonarola did, indeed, afford him infinite
consolation; they were to him a _via media_ between Protestant
latitude and dogmatic belief.

The republican simplicity, stern morals, and sweeping reforms both in
Church and state preached by Savonarola (reforms, indeed, as radical
as were consistent with Catholicism), were the objects of his special
reverence. Savonarola had died at the stake for practising and for
teaching them; Marescotti declared, with characteristic enthusiasm,
that he was ready to do likewise. Wrong or right, he believed that, if
Savonarola had lived in the nineteenth century, he would have acted
as he himself had done. In the same manner, although an avowed
republican, he was no _sans-culotte._ His strong sense of personal
independence and of freedom, political and religious, caused him to
revolt against what he conceived tyranny or coercion of any kind. Even
constitutional monarchy was not sufficiently free for him. A king and
a court, the royal prerogative of ministers, patent places, pensions,
favors, the unacknowledged influence of a reigning house--represented
to his mind a modified system of tyranny--therefore of corruption.
Constant appeals to the sovereign people, a form of government
where the few yielded to the many, and the rich divided their riches
voluntarily with the poor--was in theory what he ad