it in his gardens
at Careggi, whence it was brought here by Cosimo I.

Passing through that old palace, up the great staircase into the Salone
del Cinquecento, where Savonarola was tried, with the Cappella di S.
Bernardo, where he made his last communion, and at last up the staircase
into the tower, where he was tortured and imprisoned, it is ever of that
mad pathetic figure, self-condemned and self-murdered, that you think,
till at last, coming out of the Palazzo, you seek the spot of his awful
death in the Piazza. Fanatic puritan as he was, vainer than any Medici,
it is difficult to understand how he persuaded the Florentines to listen
to his eloquence, spoiled as it must have been for them by the Ferrarese
dialect. How could a people who were the founders of the modern world,
the creators of modern culture, allow themselves to be baffled by a
fanatic friar prophesying judgment? Yet something of a peculiar charm, a
force that we miss in the sensual and almost devilish face we see in his
portrait, he must have possessed, for it is said that Lorenzo desired
his company; and even though we are able to persuade ourselves that it
was for other reasons than to enjoy his friendship, we have yet to
explain the influence he exercised over Sandro Botticelli and Pico della
Mirandola, whose lives he changed altogether. In the midst of a people
without a moral sense he appears like the spirit of denial. He was
kicking against the pricks, he was guilty of the sin against the light,
and whether his aim was political or religious, or maybe both, he
failed. It is said he denied Lorenzo absolution, that he left him
without a word at the brink of the grave but when he himself came to
die by the horrible, barbaric means he had invoked in a boast, he did
not show the fortitude of the Magnificent. Full of every sort of
rebellion and violence, he made anarchy in Florence, and scoffed at the
Holy See, while he was a guest of the one and the officer of the other.
His bonfires of "vanities," as he called them, were possibly as
disastrous for Florence as the work of the Puritan was for England; for
while he burned the pictures, they sold them to the Jews. He is dead,
and has become one of the bores of history; and while Americans leave
their cards on the stone that marks the place of his burning, the
Florentines appear to have forgotten him. Peace to his ashes!

As you enter the Loggia de' Lanzi, gay with children now, once the
lounge of the S