e oratory of Savonarola,
must study this volume.'[1]

[1] These sermons were printed from the notes taken by Lorenzo
Violi in one volume at Venice, 1534.

Very terrific indeed are the denunciations contained in these
discourses--denunciations fulminated without disguise against the Pope
and priests of Rome, against the Medici, against the Florentines
themselves, in whom the traces of rebellion were beginning to appear.
Mingled with these vehement invectives, couched in Savonarola's most
impassioned style and heightened by his most impressive imagery, are
political harangues and polemical arguments against the Pope. The
position assumed by the friar in his war with Rome was not a strong one,
and the reasoning by which he supported it was marked by curious
self-deception mingled with apparent efforts to deceive his audience. He
had not the audacious originality of Luther. He never went to the length
of braving Alexander by burning his bulls and by denying the authority
of popes in general. Not daring to break all connection with the Holy
See, he was driven to quibble about the distinction between the office
and the man, assuming a hazardous attitude of obedience to the Church
whose head and chief he daily outraged. At the same time he took no
pains to enlist the sympathies of the Italian princes, many of whom
might presumably have been hostile to the Pope, on his side of the
quarrel. All the tyrants came in for a share of his prophetic
indignation. Lodovico Sforza, the lord of Mirandola, and Piero de'
Medici felt themselves specially aggrieved, and kept urging Alexander to
extinguish this source of scandal to established governments. Against so
great and powerful a host one man could not stand alone. Savonarola's
position became daily more dangerous in Florence. The merchants,
excommunicated by the Pope and thus exposed to pillage in foreign
markets, grumbled at the friar who spoiled their trade. The ban of
interdiction lay upon the city, where the sacraments could no longer be
administered or the dead be buried with the rites of Christians.
Meanwhile a band of high-spirited and profligate young men, called
Compagnacci, used every occasion to insult and interrupt him. At last in
March 1498 his staunch friends, the Signory, or supreme executive of
Florence, suspended him from preaching in the Duomo. Even the populace
were weary of the protracted quarrel with the Holy See: nor could any
but his own fanatical adher