Camilla, with her, mourn forever. Cavalier, brave cavalier, can you not look up, and muse ?" to, their preserver. ence. Hilary, being thus invoked, though he had no idea what was meant the language being pure Castilian - certainly did look up, and try with very bad success to muse. His eyes met kind Camilla's first (because she was leaning over him), but in spite of close resemblance, found not what they wanted in them, and wandered on, and met the eyes of Claudia, and rested there. Camilla, with the speed of love outwinging all the wings of thought, felt, like a stab, this absence from her and this presence elsewhere. And having plenty of inborn pride, as behoved her and became her well, she turned away to go, and leave her sister (who could not pray at all) to pray for what seemed to be more her own. Ánd her heart was bitter, as she turned away. Claudia (who cared not one half-real for Hilary, or what became of him; and who never prayed for herself, or told her beads, or did any religious thing) was also ready to go, with a mind relieved of noxious duty; when her softer, and therefore nobler, sister came back, with her small pride conquered. "It is not a time to dispute," she said, "nor even to give one's self to pray, when violent pain is tearing one. My sister, I have prayed for days, and twice as much by night; and yet everything grows much worse, alas ! Last night I dreamed a dream of great strangeness. It may have come from my birthday saint. The good Teresina is having her dinner; and she always occupies one large hour in that consummation. Do a thing of courage, sister; you always are so rich in courage." His glance might have lingered till dark night fell, before that young Donna returned it. All her power of thought or feeling, fearing, hoping, or despairing, was gathered into one sad gaze at her guest, her saviour, and her love. Carefully as she had watched him through the time when there was no danger, she had not been allowed by the ancient nurse to come near him for the last three days. And even now she had been content to obey Teresina's orders, and to trust in the saints, with her calm sweet faith-age now." the saints who had sent this youth to save her but for her stronger sister's will. - 66 “Disturb him not, sister, but let him rest," said Claudia, whose fair bosom never was a prey to gratitude; see you not how well he lies? If we should happen to cause disturbance, he might roll over, and break into bleeding; and then you could pray for his soul alone." "Sister mine, you do not speak well," Camilla answered, gently; "he has shed so much blood for us, that he is not likely to bleed more. It is now the want of the blood, and the fever, that will make us "What do you mean?" asked Claudia, smiling; "you seem to have all the cour "Alas! I have no courage, Claudia. You are laughing at me. But if you would only raise the bandage - I dare not touch the poor cavalier - where the sad inflammation is, that makes him look at you so — it is possible that I could, or perhaps that you could "Could what?" asked Claudia, who was not of a long-enduring temper; "I have no fear to touch him; and he seems to be all bandages. There now, is that what you require?" Camilla shuddered as her sister firmly (as if she were swathing a mummy of four thousand years) untied Teresina's knots, and laid un bare the angry wound, which was eating Hilary's life away. Then a livid virulent gash appeared, banked with proud flesh upon either side, and Claudia could not look at it. But Camilla gathered the courage often latent in true gentleness, and heeded only in her heart how the poor young fellow fell away and fainted from the bold exposure, and falling back, thus made his wound open and gape wider. "I see it! I see it! I shall save him yet," she cried, in feminine ecstasy; and while Claudia thought her mad, she snatched from the chain at her zone a little steel implement, often carried by Spanish girls for beauty's sake. With dainty skimmings, and the lightest touch, she contrived to get this well inside all the mere outward mischief, and drew out a splinter of rusty iron, and held it up to the light in triumph; and then she went down on her knees and sobbed, but still held fast her trophy. "What is it? Let me see!" cried Claudia, being accustomed to take the lead; "Saint plague, what is a mere shred like that, to cause so much emotion? It may be something the old nurse put there, and so you have done more harm than good." "Do nurses put pieces of jagged iron into a wound to heal it? It is part of a cruel Frenchman's sword. Behold the fangs of it, and the venomous rust! What agony to the poor cavalier! Now sponge his forehead with the vinegar; for you are the best and most welcome nurse. And when he revives show him this, and his courage will soon be renewed to him. I can stay here no longer, I feel so faint. I will go to my saint, and thank her.” When old Teresina returned, and found her patient looking up at Claudia, with his wound laid bare, she began to scold and wring her hands, and order her visitor out of the room; but the proud young lady would have none of that. this. The marvellous power of your bright eyes has cast their light on everything. That poor old I, with these poor members, might have gazed and gazed forever; when lo! the most beautiful and high-born lady under heaven appears, and saves the life of the handsome lord that loves her." "We will speak no more upon this matter," Claudia answered, magnanimously. And the nurse thenceforth was ready to vow, and Hilary only too glad to believe, that the sorely wounded soldier owed his life to a beautiful maiden. And so he did; but not to Claudia. From Macmillan's Magazine. THE CONVENT OF SAN MARCO. III. PREACHER AND PRIOR. SAVONAROLA yielded to the entreaties of the laymen who crowded his cloister, almost displacing his novices, and who besought him to preach in the church, a larger place, where greater numbers might find room. After some delay, "smiling" upon his petitioners "with a cheerful countenance," he told them that on the next Sunday he would read in the church, lecture, and preach, adding, Burlamacchi tells us, "And I shall preach for eight years; " which afterwards came true. It was on the 1st of August, 1489, that this event took place. The church was so crowded, the same authority tells us, "that there scarcely remained any room for the Frati, who, in their eager desire to hear, were obliged to find places on the wall of the choir, and were so determined not to lose the lecture, that scarcely any remained in the offices of the community, and door and sacristy were alike deserted. Of the laymen present, most stood all the time, and some, laying hold of the iron railings, hung from them as well as they could, in their great desire to hear." He preached upon a passage in Revelation. "Three things he suggested to the people. That the Church of God required renewal, and that immediately; second, that all Italy should be chastised; third, that this should come to pass soon." This was the very beginning of his prophetic utter That last word she pronounced with such ances in Florence, and immense though a bitterness of irony, that poor Teresina's his popularity was, "great contradicportly form and well-fed cheeks shook tions," as Burlamacchi says, at once arose violently. "For the love of all the saints, in respect to him, some thinking him sweet Donna, do not let my lord know thoroughly sincere and true, some that "A pretty nurse you are," she cried, "to leave this in your patient's wound! Is this your healing instrument, pray? What will the Count of Zamora say when I show him this specimen of your skill? How long will he keep you in this house? Oh blind, demented, gorging, wallowing, and most despicable nurse! him curiously, and by degrees suffered itself to be drawn into ever more eager attention to the Frate whose power and genius it had at length discovered. Burlamacchi informs us, in his simple narrative, that the effect produced upon those who heard him by his parlare veloce e infiammativo, was that of a miracle. "The grace of God appeared," he says, "in the lofty words and profound thoughts which he gave forth with a clear voice and rapid tongue, so that every one understood him. And it was admirable to see his glowing countenance and fervent and reverent aspect when he preached, and his beautiful and appropri ate gestures, which rapt the very soul of every one who heard him, so that wonders and amazing appearances were seen by many while he was in the act of preaching." These wonders were such as the de though learned and good he was crafty, ner of man was in its midst, watched and some, that he gave himself up to foolish visions; for in this first sermon, amid much that was drawn from the Scriptures, he mixed up the particular revelations which he firmly believed were made to himself a circumstance not so astonishing in the fifteenth century as it would be now; but yet exciting the contempt of many in that lettered and elegant age. The excitement thus produced was very great. The Florentines were totally unused to the fervent natural eloquence of a preacher who rejected all traditions of oratory, and, careless of fine style or graceful diction, poured forth what was in him in floods of fiery words, carried away by his own earnestness and warmth of feeling. To see a man thus inspired by his subject, possessed by what he has to say, too much in earnest to choose his phrases or think of anything-taste, literature, style, or reputation-except vout imagination fondly attaches to all that something which he is bound to tell popular apostles. Some believed they saw his auditors, and which to them and to an angel on each side of him as he him is a matter of life and death—this preached. Some saw the Madonna in glory is at all times a wonderful and impressive blessing him with fair, uplifted hand, when spectacle. No simulation can attain this he blessed the worshippers around. But effect; the fervour may be vulgar, it may the real effect of his sermons was great be associated with narrow views and a enough to enable his followers to dislimited mind; but wherever it exists, in pense with miraculous adjuncts. It does great or small, in learned or unlearned, not appear, nor is it probable, that Sathe man possessed by it has a power over vonarola preached, as is our English cushis fellow men which nothing else can tom, on every Sunday, or regularly from equal. Savonarola was neither vulgar week to week, but according to the wise nor limited in mind, and his whole soul practice of his Church, occasionally, and was intensely practical, concentrated upon in the seasons appropriated to special the real evils around him, diverted into spiritual exercise. By the Lent of 1491 no generalities or speculations, not even San Marco had become too small for the diffused abroad upon the world and man-crowds that came to hear him, and he rekind in general, but riveted upon Flor-moved to the Duomo, where he remained ence in particular, upon the sins, strifes, during the eight years which was the frauds, and violences which made the limit, as it is said he prophesied it would city weak and put her down from herbe, of his mission to Florence and the high estate. She was enslaved, she, once world. the freest of the free; and Savonarola Few buildings could be more appropri was burning with that almost extravagant ate to receive a preacher so impassioned love of civic freedom which distinguished and listeners so intent. The cathedral of the Italian republics. She was corrupt, Florence has not the wealth, the splenand the man who loved her like a mis- dour, nor the daylight of that great St. tress could not support the sense of her Peter's, of which Michelangelo said that impurity. It shamed him and wrung his it should be the sister-"piu grande, heart, as if indeed this chosen city of his ma non piu bella" — of Santa Maria dei affections had been a woman whom he Fiori. It has nothing of the soaring adored. So intense, so personal, were grace and spiritual beauty of our northSavonarola's sentiments, that this image ern Gothic. It is dark, majestic, mysticis not too strong to express them. He al- a little light coming in through the carried the passionate fervour with which painted windows, which are gorgeous in a brother, a father, might struggle to re- their deep colour, not silvery, like the claim a lost creature very dear to him old jewel glass of the north. The vast into his relations with the city which, area is bare and naked in a certain sunow finally awakened to see what man-perb poverty, fit to be filled with a silent, Thus they waited three or four hours till the Padre entered the pulpit. And the attention of so great a mass of people, all with eyes and ears intent upon the preacher, was wonderful; they listened so, that when the sermon reached its end it seemed to them that it had scarcely begun. somewhat stern Italian crowd, with a, was great in the church, each one going to his mass of characteristic Tuscan faces place; and he who could read, with a taper in vigorous, harsh, seldom beautiful. One his hand, read the service, and other prayers. can imagine the great voice, veloce e in- And though many thousand people were thus collected together, no sound was to be heard, fiammativo-lighting up a glow of pas46 not even a hush," until the arrival of the sionate feeling in all those responsive children, who sang hymns with so much sweetgleaming eyes-coming out of the darkness that heaven seemed to have opened. circle under the dome, and resounding over the heads of the crowd which filled the nave. No scene could suit better the large bare nobleness of the place. Before he came to the cathedral the preacher had so far advanced in boldness, and in the certainty of that burden of woe which he had to deliver, that still greater] In the midst of this crowd were many and greater "contradictions" had risen notable persons, little likely to be led up against him. "When he thought of away by the common craze after a popular this," says Burlamacchi, "he was some- preacher; men whose hearts burned times afraid, and in his own mind re- within them to think of the loss of their solved not to preach of such things. ancient liberties as Florentines, and who But everything else that he read and instinctively felt that they had found in studied became odious to him." Before this brave Frate and his passionate grief Septuagesima Sunday of this first Lenten over surrounding evils, an ally and season in which he preached in the ca- spokesman beyond their hopes; men thedral, he seems to have made a distinct who, trained in Lorenzo's court to an adpause of alarm, and a serious effort to miration of intellectual power, could not change, as Padre Marchese tells us, the but perceive its presence in the cowled entire form, style, and argument of his Dominican; and men voiceless by napreaching. "God is my witness," says ture, whose righteous souls were sick Savonarola himself, "that the whole of and sad at the daily sight of the corrupSaturday and the succeeding night I lay tion round them. One of these latter awake thinking, but could not turn my- was Prospero Pitti, canon of the catheself, so completely was my path closed to dral, a wise and pious old man, of whom me, and every idea taken away except Burlamacchi tells us that he too for years this. In the morning (being weary with had borne his homely testimony against long watching) I heard this said, Fool, the evils of the time, prophesying, as so dost thou not see that it is God's will many a humble prophet does in evil days, that thou shouldst preach thus?' And that the vengeance of God must soon so that morning I preached a tremendous overtake the crimes and vices that were sermon." Burlamacchi speaks of this visibly rising to a climax before his eyes. same sermon as mirabile e stupenda. The The old canon was one of those who flood which the preacher had attempted cherished the beautiful imagination so thus to restrain broke forth with fiercer long current in those ages, and fondly force than ever. And even the very tu- transmitted from one generation to anmults that rose against him, the gran- other, of the Papa Angelico, the heavendissima contraditione, no doubt excitedly-minded Pope, true Vicar of Christ, and stimulated his hearers. Burlamacchi's description of the crowds who came to hear him, though probably it belongs chronologically to a somewhat later date, may be given here: The people got up in the middle of the night to get places for the sermon, and came to the door of the cathedral, waiting outside till it should be opened, making no account of any inconvenience, neither of the cold, nor the wind, nor of standing in winter with their feet on the marble; and among them were young and old, women and children, of every sort, who came with such jubilee and rejoicing that it was bewildering to hear them, going to the sermon as to a wedding. Then the silence who was one day to come, and revive and renew the Christian world, convert the infidel, and make the Church glorious as when her Divine Founder planted her on earth. Among the wide and general prophecies of vague vengeance for sin and vindication of the righteous in which this old priest relieved his soul, was one, more particularly, of many preachers to be sent forth by God to sound trumpets of warning to the sinful, and especially arise in the order of the Predicatori, among them of a prophet who should "who should do great things in Florence, and who after much labour should die there." When the old canon suddenly to heard a voice rise in his own cathedral, | minds enlightened. Our space forbids "intoning" with prophetic force, gladius us to quote at any length; and the adDomini super terram, cito et velociter, dresses of an orator, aided by all the he bent his head between his hands, and power of sympathetic voice, gesture, and after an interval, turning to his nephew, look, can rarely bear the ordeal of print, Carlo Pitti, who was at his side: "This," much less of translation. But his desaid he, "is that holy prophet of whom nunciations of avarice, usury, and ramI have talked to you for ten years." pant worldliness, are as strenuous and Nor was Canon Pitti the only "devout impassioned person "who had note from Heaven of the coming of the preacher. Another noble citizen of Florence, passing through the Via di Servi in company with some of his friends, one morning in the year 1487, before Savonarola had been recalled to Florence, felt himself plucked by the mantle by a stranger absolutely unknown to him, and whom he never saw again, who drew him within a neighbouring church, and there revealed to him, as was done to the woman of Samaria, "all things that ever he did; " finishing with the news that by the intercession of the Virgin a certain Fra Girolamo of Ferrara was coming to Florence to save the city from the destruction due to her sins. This, and much more, Burlamacchi relates, with primitive simplicity and faith; and no doubt such tales flew about the streets, and added to the general interest in the preacher, and to the excitement with which his glowing discourses were received. as his exhortations prayer and the study of the Bible are touching and beautiful. Many efforts have been made to prove by his subordination of rites and ceremonies to spiritual truth and sincerity, by his elevated spiritual appreciation of the love of Christ, of faith in Him, and of the supreme authority of Scripture, that Savonarola was an early Luther - an undeveloped Reformer, an unconscious Protestant. But he was a Protestant only so far as every man is who protests against evil and clings to the good no other dissent was in his mind. Wherever he saw, he hated evil with a vigour and passion such as our weakened faculties seem scarcely capable of; but Savonarola's Protestantism ended there, where it began. We cannot refrain from qnoting one beautiful passage on the nature of prayer, which shows the profound spiritual sensibility and insight of the man. These discourses were but little philo- He who prays to God ought to address Him sophical, notwithstanding the fact that as if He were present; for He is everywhere, Savonarola seems to have been one of in every place, in every man, and especially in the first, if not the very first, who took in the souls of the just. Seek Him not therefore on the earth, or in heaven, or elsewhere hand to demonstrate the reality and seek for Him in your own hearts; do as did power of Christianity by the light of the prophet who says, "I will hear what God natural reason, leaving revelation and the Lord will speak." In prayer, a man may spiritual authority aside a serious un- be attending to the words and this is a thing dertaking for a man who himself saw of a wholly material nature; he may be atvisions and received revelations, but tending to the sense of the words, and this is proving a doctrine which is strange to rather study than prayer; and lastly, his whole the common mind-the compatibility of thoughts may be directed to God, and this a certain noble good sense and philo-alone is true prayer. It is unnecessary to be sophical power with those gifts of enthu-mind must be elevated above self, and must considering either sentences or words-the siasm and lofty imagination which carry be wholly absorbed in the thought of God. the inspired soul beyond the limits of Arrived at this state, the true believer forgets the seen and tangible. Nothing is more the world and its wants; he has attained real than this conjunction, yet nothing almost a foreshadow of celestial happiness. is more generally wondered at or more To this state of elevation the ignorant may frequently denied. His sermons, more-arrive as easily as the learned. over, were profoundly practical; the personal appeal of a man full of indignation, sorrow, and love to the faulty, the cruel, the arrogant and selfish, who, notwithstanding all these evil qualities, were still men, capable of repentance, of goodness, blessedness, heaven itself, could but their hearts be moved and their a It even frequently happens, that he who repeats a psalm without understanding its words, utters who can explain its meaning. Words in fact much more holy prayer than the learned man are not indispensable to an act of prayer:\ when a man is truly rapt in the spirit, an uttered prayer becomes rather an impediment, and ought to yield to that which is wholly mental.' Thus it will be seen how great a |