"This," said Sir Henry, taking down another bottle, " is a kidney in that state of incipient disease, in which yours is at the present time."

The Captain viewed it with comical concern.

"This," continued Sir Henry, taking down a third bottle, "is what your kidney will be a few months hence."

The Captain stood aghast.

"And this," added Sir Henry, taking down a fourth bottle, "is what your kidney will become in its last and fatal state."

The Captain bolted!
However, the Captain gave up

his glass of wine, which he couldn't do without, and, thanks to Sir Henry's original mode of dealing with a refractory patient, recovered his health.

Nevertheless, the Captain used always to maintain that he had a "constitutional tendency" to nephritic malady; in support of which thesis he was accustomed to state that his father, the Admiral, had a tendency to the same form of disease.

I can just remember the Admiral, and of one thing I have a perfect recollection-the Admiral, like his son, had a very red nose.

THE names and memories of great men are the dowry of a nation. Widowhood, overthrow, desertion, even slavery, cannot take away from her this sacred inheritance. It is natural to expect that, whenever national life begins to rise and quicken-when new crises of profound moment occur, and the great acts of the past begin to be emulated that dead heroes should rise in the memories of men, and appear to the living to stand by in solemn spectatorship and approval. No country can be lost which feels herself overlooked by such glorious witnesses. They are the salt of the earth in death as well as in life. What they did once, their descendants have still and always a right to do after them; and their example lives in their country, a continual stimulant and encouragement for him who has the soul to adopt it. There is, however, a wellunderstood phase of human sentiment which leads men to build the sepulchres of the prophets without much thought of emulating their career. Italy, of all countries, has perhaps the greatest beadroll of

illustrious names, and she has not failed to do them honour with rites of hero-worship unknown to the reticence of the North. But it is not without a significance greater than that of a mere popular demonstration or lavish bestowal of flowers and garlands that we behold rising over that agitated realm, in lines growing more and more distinct under the touch of reverential students of her strange history, the grand medieval figure of that Friar of St Mark's, who once held in his hands the destinies of Florence, and who, going through all the most tragic vicissitudes of fate, gave up his sovereignty in the pulpit only to gain on the scaffold the profounder authority of a saint.

The life of Savonarola, many times before written and re-written, in love and hatred, by religious zeal and political partisanship, by men who thought him the glory of San Marco, and men who believed him a

precursor of Luther, has just been given to the English reader by Mr Leonard Horner, in a translation of the elaborate biography by Professor Villari* of the University

of Pisa. It is a book unlikely ever to become popular, notwithstanding the interest and picturesque character of its subject. The style, except now and then for a moment, when the excitement of the story becomes too much for ordinary even English composure to withstand, and the author forgets himself, is of the heavy historical fashion in use before it began to dawn upon the writers of history that men were more interesting than dates, and that events could only be clearly described through human intervention. Professor Villari, in the quiet of that silent city, where no voice but the multitudinous voices of beggary awakes the echoes, has been for years labouring to collect every fact respecting the great Dominican which libraries or manuscripts, under the severest inspection, could render up to him; and the result is here collected and set forth in two serious but unattractive volumes, through which the great Italian Reformer of the fifteenth century may be dimly apprehended moving amid all the tumults and turmoils of the time. The work is done with evident care and conscientiousness, and the translation is apparently executed in a congenial spirit of heavy faithfulness, though the sonnets of Savonarola, which Mr Horner has boldly rendered into verse, get but scant justice in the translation.

Most

people know something of the great man here delineated, but few ordinary readers are acquainted otherwise than vaguely with the real import of his life and labours. He stands here before us, not as an early martyr in the van of the Reformation, but as a Catholic saint-one of the most honoured monks of the order of Dominic. According ly, no suspicious excess of light is thrown upon the picture; the hero is not forced into further advancement or clearer views than it was possible he could have held. We do not recognise in him an Italian Huss or Wickliffe, but we see what is greater-a primitive Christian

toiling in a noble sorrow, which is often half-despair, to revive in the world the life of Christ, and to snatch from the devils and powers of darkness one consecrated city to be the stronghold of the Lord. Such seems to have been the splendid idea which hovered before the inspired vision of Fra Girolamo, and which connects him here and there all through the history of the world with a brilliant but scanty lineage of world-reformers, whom the world has in the end rejected with an unvarying consistency. Such men are seldom perfect, not always wise; they aim by times at a virtue which is impossible, and beyond the reach of man; but it is with a deepened sense of the grandeur of goodness that the observer turns from the sight of an enthusiasm so noble, and recognises that here and there, in one pair of human eyes at least, no ideal excellence has been impossible, and falsehood and wickedness have been the only inconceivable wonders under the sun.

Girolamo Savonarola was born on the 21st September 1452, in the city of Ferrara, of a family of gentle blood, but chiefly distinguished by the eminence of a physician, who, when this boy, his grandson, was born, was the head of the house. Girolamo was the third son, but seems speedily to have shown such signs of genius as justified his parents in building special hopes upon him as the heir of his grandfather's honours. He was brought up on the edge of the court, accustomed to see and take part in the festivities and royal entertainments, which give in the soberest story a theatrical glitter and pageantry to the small but wealthy courts of medieval princes. house of Este was virtuous, as Italian princes went in these days; but underneath the masks and revels lay a dark current of tragical human life and crime, which made itself miserably apparent to the eyes of the thoughtful boy, of whom his father would fain have

The

made a court physician. The world was in one of its culminating points of wickedness and disorder. The lights of Christian faith were extinguished everywhere, except where they linger longest, in the peasant huts where people knew no better, or perhaps dimly in some remote cloister, where here and there an ignorant monk said his paternoster out of a faithful heart. The learned and wise and great professed a kind of elegant theoretical paganism, which did not object, as a matter of taste, to the gorgeous rites of the Church; and, as was natural under the reign of a sham belief falsely held, confusion and falsehood became predominant throughout the bewildered country. To be in favour at court, yet to keep an eye and ear open to the chances of conspiracy, was the creed of the rich; to see all the spectacles and bear all the spoliations, was the philosophy of the poor. Above, all glitter and cloth-of-gold, feats of arms and smiles of ladies, and reception of wandering princes, popes, and emperors; beneath, all wrongs and hardships, prisons and plagues and famines, injustice and oppression. The lad Girolamo grew up, with deep eyes piercing, from beneath his heavy overhanging brow, through and through the gilded mask. He was close to it, almost behind the scenes; and, musing in the leisure of his youth, his indignant heart burned within him. When other lads began to touch their light lutes to love-measures, he set the sadness of his soul to his, and taught the tender chords to cry out and mourn over the ruin of the world. He, too, had his love-strain, a short and sad romance. Matters went ill with the stern-featured boy in that court, where smooth faces count for more than high hearts. Perhaps this youthful disappointment gave the last touch of personal

bitterness to the indignation and sorrow of his soul. Amid false princes, false priests, false love and learning, where was the young enthusiast to flee for that truth without which he found it impossible to live? Looking round upon the world with indignant youthful observation, he found that ogni virtute ed ogni bel costume" had disappeared from the face of the earth

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that men were not even ashamed of their vices-and that the popular ideal was realised in him,

"Che per fraude e per forza la più acquisto, Chi sprezza il ciel con Cristo, E sempre pensa altrui cacciare al fondo.” * Pondering such thoughts, he wandered about the churches, praying long before deserted altars, where few came to worship; and meditating in his melancholy mind an escape out of the dreary world into the cloister, where purity and truth might still be possible. Such an escape, however, involved the destruction of all the hopes of his family, of all the gentler affections of his youth; and the lad lingered over the irrevocable step with a bursting heart.

At length, when his powers of selfcontrol were almost exhausted, there occurred a festa in Ferrara-the festival of St George. The Savonarole, like all their neighbours, were out in the gay Corso in the sweet April weather. Girolamo lingered in the deserted house when all the holiday people were gone. With a boyish instinct he laid among his books in the window an essay on 'Disregard of the World'-and then, escaping unobserved, took his mournful way to Bologna, where he went at once to the convent of the Dominicans and asked admission. He was received at once, without any apparent difficulty; and on the same day, as soon as he found himself alone, he wrote to his father to explain and beg for forgiveness. In

sion), left our house, and went to Bologna, and entered the Dominican convent, intending to remain there and become a monk, leaving me, Nicolo Savonarola, his father, for my comfort nothing but these writings." The hopes of the family were thus extinguished for ever: their gifted son was lost-dead to them, as he himself repeats at a later period. The little Albert might, indeed, be trained to the hereditary profession, and fill his brother's place; but, so far as Girolamo was concerned, hope and pride were over for ever.

He spent seven years after in his cloister at Bologna, not a servant, as he had intended to be made, but an instructor of novices, developing his own mind under what were, perhaps, on the whole, the best influences he could have been surrounded with, but immediately waking, with as deep a sense of reality as that which had driven him out of the world, to the dangers and miseries which menaced the Church. Again the young man's trouble broke forth into verse, but now it was De Ruina Ecclesiae that his mournful lute lamented. He saw a vision of the Church, wounded and impoverished, dwelling in a cave, where she "led her life in weeping." It was Rome, she said, "una fallace, superba meretrice," who had brought her so low; but when the young reformer started up with indignant devotion to "break the great wings" of the harlot, the Church hushed the impetuous youth. "Weep and be silent; this is best," said the sacred mother. Such was the half-despairing patience into which the young optimist, who had imagined the cloister a refuge from all ills, had to subdue himself, when his deep eyes had time to penetrate the veil of life within as well as without the holy enclosure. A sad, abstracted, emaciated monk, always with his cowl over his head, and a world of indignant sorrow ful thoughts throbbing underneath, finding the world utterly corrupt, yet evermore giving the devil the

lie, and declaring that so it must not, shall not, continue to be; wearing the stones with his weary feet in impatient pacings, with his knees in vehement prayers, and his own sensitive frame with fastings and discipline, if, perhaps, that might mend the matter; but not troublesome to his superiors, being far too deeply occupied with that passion of horror and grief and prophetic indignation in his heart. One wicked pope succeeded another as the young monk ripened into manhood and instructed the novices, doubtless sowing strange seed in the minds of his pupils. All around the Bolognese cloister Italy heaved and struggled in a chaos of disorder and vice and imbecility. In his own Ferrara a pretender sought and lost the crown and his life; in Milan and Florence, murder took the aid of sacrilege, and slew its victims at the altar in the most sacred acts of worship. There was not a single spot in the desert upon which his burning eyes could rest for consolation, for he had not yet even found that voice and utterance with which he was hereafter to plead God's cause against the world.

At the end of these seven years he was sent back to Ferrara for a time, the only record of which lies in his repetition of the familiar saying, that a prophet has no honour in his own country. In the same year (1482), Ferrara having become a centre of war, the superior of the Dominicans dispersed the greater number of his monks, and sent Fra Girolamo to Florence. There he went to the Convent of San Marco, then one of the most dignified and learned communities of the order, as it still continues to be. A library of valuable manuscripts had given importance to the brotherhood, for which Cosmo di Medici had built a new convent, establishing thereby the first public library in Italy; and an equal and sweeter glory had been thrown around the house by the pictures of the Blessed Angelico, which are