o is borne past still locked
in the death-clutch of the human avenger--"justice is like the kingdom of
God: it is not without us as a fact; it is within us as a great
yearning." In these solemn truthful words we have suggested to us how
feebly mere physical death can shadow forth that spiritual corruption,
that "second death," which we have seen hour by hour consummating in him
who has lived for self alone.

Few of the great figures which stand up amid the dimness of medieval
history are more perplexing to historian and biographer than Savonarola.
On a first glance we seem shut up to one or other of two
alternatives--regarding him as an apostle and martyr, or as a charlatan.
And even more careful examination leaves in his character and life
anomalies so extraordinary, contradictions so inextricable, that most
historians have fallen back on the hypothesis of partial insanity--the
insanity born of an honest and upright but extravagant fanaticism--as the
only one adequate to explain the mystery. Whether George Eliot has in
this work produced a more satisfactory solution, we do not attempt
formally to determine. We are sure, however, that every thoughtful
reader will recognise that the solution she offers is one in strict and
deep consistency with all the laws of human action, and all the
tendencies of human imperfection; and that the Savonarola she places
before us is a being we can understand _by sympathy_--sympathy at once
with the greatness of his aims, and still more fully with the weaknesses
that lead him astray.

The picture is a very impressive one, alike in its grandeur and in its
sadness, speaking its true, deep, universal lesson home to us and to our
life: alike when it shows us the strength and nobleness of life attuning
itself to the highest good, and battling on toward the highest right; and
when it shows us how self, under a form which does not seem self, may
steal in to sap its strength and to abase its nobleness.

The great Monk-prophet comes upon the scene a new "voice crying in the
wilderness" of selfishness and wrong around him--an impassioned witness
that "there is a God that judgeth in the earth," protesting by speech and
by life against the self-seeking and self-pleasing he sees on every side.
To the putting down of this, to the living his own life, to the rousing
all men to live theirs, not to pleasure, but to God; merging all private
interests in the public good, and that the best good; looking