eader of the mediaeval rear-guard. He fought
a valiant battle. Day after day he thundered his warnings of God's holy
wrath through the wide halls of Santa Maria del Fiore. "Repent," he
cried, "repent of your godlessness, of your joy in things that are not
holy!" He began to hear voices and to see flaming swords that flashed
through the sky. He preached to the little children that they might not
fall into the errors of these ways which were leading their fathers to
perdition. He organised companies of boy-scouts, devoted to the service
of the great God whose prophet he claimed to be. In a sudden moment of
frenzy, the frightened people promised to do penance for their wicked
love of beauty and pleasure. They carried their books and their statues
and their paintings to the market place and celebrated a wild "carnival
of the vanities" with holy singing and most unholy dancing, while
Savonarola applied his torch to the accumulated treasures.

But when the ashes cooled down, the people began to realise what they
had lost. This terrible fanatic had made them destroy that which they
had come to love above all things. They turned against him, Savonarola
was thrown into jail. He was tortured. But he refused to repent for
anything he had done. He was an honest man. He had tried to live a holy
life. He had willingly destroyed those who deliberately refused to share
his own point of view. It had been his duty to eradicate evil wherever
he found it. A love of heathenish books and heathenish beauty in the
eyes of this faithful son of the Church, had been an evil. But he stood
alone. He had fought the battle of a time that was dead and gone. The
Pope in Rome never moved a finger to save him. On the contrary, he
approved of his "faithful Florentines" when they dragged Savonarola to
the gallows, hanged him and burned his body amidst the cheerful howling
and yelling of the mob.

It was a sad ending, but quite inevitable. Savonarola would have been
a great man in the eleventh century. In the fifteenth century he was
merely the leader of a lost cause. For better or worse, the Middle
Ages had come to an end when the Pope had turned humanist and when the
Vatican became the most important museum of Roman and Greek antiquities.

THE AGE OF EXPRESSION

THE PEOPLE BEGAN TO FEEL THE NEED OF GIVING EXPRESSION TO THEIR NEWLY
DISCOVERED JOY OF LIVING. THEY EXPRESSED THEIR HAPPINESS IN POETRY AND
IN SCULPTURE AND IN ARCHITECTURE AND IN PAINTI