republican stands in
everlasting protest, preferring his failure to his rival's success. The
issue is still between him and Lorenzo, between the responsibilities of
liberty and the license of slavery, between the perils of truth and the
security of silence, between the pleasure of toil and the toil of
pleasure. The supporters of Lorenzo the Magnificent are assuredly among
us, men for whom even nations and empires only exist to satisfy the
moment, men to whom the last hot hour of summer is better than a sharp
and wintry spring. They have an art, a literature, a political
philosophy, which are all alike valued for their immediate effect upon
the taste, not for what they promise of the destiny of the spirit. Their
statuettes and sonnets are rounded and perfect, while "Macbeth" is in
comparison a fragment, and the Moses of Michael Angelo a hint. Their
campaigns and battles are always called triumphant, while Caesar and
Cromwell wept for many humiliations. And the end of it all is the hell
of no resistance, the hell of an unfathomable softness, until the whole
nature recoils into madness and the chamber of civilisation is no longer
merely a cushioned apartment, but a padded cell.

This last and worst of human miseries Savonarola saw afar off, and bent
his whole gigantic energies to turning the chariot into another course.
Few men understood his object; some called him a madman, some a
charlatan, some an enemy of human joy. They would not even have
understood if he had told them, if he had said that he was saving them
from a calamity of contentment which should be the end of joys and
sorrows alike. But there are those to-day who feel the same silent
danger, and who bend themselves to the same silent resistance. They also
are supposed to be contending for some trivial political scruple.

Mr. M'Hardy says, in defending Savonarola, that the number of fine works
of art destroyed in the Burning of the Vanities has been much
exaggerated. I confess that I hope the pile contained stacks of
incomparable masterpieces if the sacrifice made that one real moment
more real. Of one thing I am sure, that Savonarola's friend Michael
Angelo would have piled all his own statues one on top of the other,
and burnt them to ashes, if only he had been certain that the glow
transfiguring the sky was the dawn of a younger and wiser world.

THE POSITION OF SIR WALTER SCOTT

Walter Scott is a writer who should just now be re-emerging into hi