was a thoroughly irreligious
philosopher; and a liberal scholar must entertain all speculations. But
the negatives might, after all, prove false; nay, seemed manifestly
false, as the circling hours swept past him, and turned round with
graver faces. For had not the world become Christian? Had he not been
baptised in San Giovanni, where the dome is awful with me symbols of
coming judgment, and where the altar bears a crucified Image disturbing
to perfect complacency in one's self and the world? Our resuscitated
Spirit was not a pagan philosopher, nor a philosophising pagan poet, but
a man of the fifteenth century, inheriting its strange web of belief and
unbelief; of Epicurean levity and fetichistic dread; of pedantic
impossible ethics uttered by rote, and crude passions acted out with
childish impulsiveness; of inclination towards a self-indulgent
paganism, and inevitable subjection to that human conscience which, in
the unrest of a new growth, was rilling the air with strange prophecies
and presentiments.

He had smiled, perhaps, and shaken his head dubiously, as he heard
simple folk talk of a Pope Angelico, who was to come by-and-by and bring
in a new order of things, to purify the Church from simony, and the
lives of the clergy from scandal--a state of affairs too different from
what existed under Innocent the Eighth for a shrewd merchant and
politician to regard the prospect as worthy of entering into his
calculations. But he felt the evils of the time, nevertheless; for he
was a man of public spirit, and public spirit can never be wholly
immoral, since its essence is care for a common good. That very
Quaresima or Lent of 1492 in which he died, still in his erect old age,
he had listened in San Lorenzo, not without a mixture of satisfaction,
to the preaching of a Dominican Friar, named Girolamo Savonarola, who
denounced with a rare boldness the worldliness and vicious habits of the
clergy, and insisted on the duty of Christian men not to live for their
own ease when wrong was triumphing in high places, and not to spend
their wealth in outward pomp even in the churches, when their
fellow-citizens were suffering from want and sickness. The Frate
carried his doctrine rather too far for elderly ears; yet it was a
memorable thing to see a preacher move his audience to such a pitch that
the women even took off their ornaments, and delivered them up to be
sold for the benefit of the needy.

"He was a noteworthy ma