Savonarola, Erasmus, and Other Essays (Volume 4) (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: several years in the name of God and of Christ. Later legend embellishes his journey by a celestial companion, who attended him to his inn, fed him with refreshing meat and wine, and guarded him to the gate of S. Gallo. Lorenzo the Magnificent had now been for many years the Lord of Florence. His age has been called the Augustan age of Italian letters (strangely enough in the native land of Dante, Ariosto, and Tasso), but he resembled Augustus in more than his patronage of poets and philosophers, ? in the skill with which, like his grandfather Cosmo, he disguised his aristocracy under republican forms. On his contested character we must not enter; nor inquire how far he compensated to Florence, for the loss of her turbulent, it must be acknowledged, her precarious, liberties, by peace, by wealth, by splendour, by the cultivation of arts and of letters; by making her the centre and the source of the new civilization of the world. Since the failure of the Pazzi conspiracy, Lorenzo had maintained his temperate but undisputed sway in Florence. His only danger was from without, and this he had averted by his wisdom and courage, by his bold visit to the court of his mortal enemy, the King of Naples; he had brought back peace to imperilled Florence, security to his own government. But the Pazzi conspiracy is so fearfully illustrative of the state of Italian, of Papal morals, at the time when Savonarola began his career, that it must not be altogether passed by. The object of that conspiracy was not the freedom of Florence, though it was to overthrow the power of the Medici. It was the substitution of the rule of another faction and family, through the authority of the Pazzi. The revolution was deliberately planned at Rome in the Papal counsels; the Pope's nephew was the prime mo...