VOL. XVII., No. 100.—JULY, 1873.
Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1873, by Rev. I. T. Hecker, in the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington, D. C.
[JEROME SAVONAROLA.]
PART SECOND.
“Ye fathers! let your children learn grammar, and keep able men as teachers who are accomplished, and not players, pay them well, and see that the schools are no holes and corners. All should practise grammar in some degree, for it wakens the mind, and helps much. But the poets should not thereby destroy everything else. There should be a law made that no bad poet should be read in the schools, such as Ovid, De Arte Amandi, Tibullus and Catullus, of the same sort, Terentius in many places. Virgil and Cicero I would suffer, Homer in the Greek, and also some passages from S. Augustine’s work, De Civitate Dei, or from S. Jerome, or something out of the Holy Scriptures. And where your teachers find in these books Jupiter, Pluto, and the like named, say then, Children, these are fables, and show them that God alone rules the world. So would the children be brought up in wisdom and in truth, and God would be with them.”—Sermon of Savonarola.
It was but natural that the striking events of the life of Savonarola, and the tragic scenes of the close of his career, should have absorbed the attention of his early biographers to the exclusion of the less attractive and more difficult duty of appreciating and presenting the moral and intellectual side of his character. He is constantly described by those friendly to his memory as a grand pulpit orator and Heaven-inspired reformer; by others, as the sensational preacher and extravagant innovator; while little or nothing is said by either of his literary and philosophical acquirements. By turns, and according to their several views, they exhibit him to us as fanatic and impostor, as prophet and martyr, while the figure of the scholar, the philosopher, and the theologian remains invisible. It is, nevertheless, but fair to say that this arises partially from the fact that a very important portion of Savonarola’s literary productions was unknown to his contemporaries and their immediate successors. Modern research has brought to light a large number of which they never heard. Another circumstance has contributed to confirm the mistaken impression concerning him as a man wanting in literary capacity, namely, the effort to make of him the enemy of literature by classing him among the opponents of the so-called revival of letters in Europe.
What is styled the revival of letters in the XVth century really began in Italy long before, and was prepared, says Hallam, by several circumstances that lie further back in Italian history. The classic revelation of the XVth century was indeed a revelation to Germany, France, and England, but not to Italy. The true restorer of classical antiquity in Italy, and consequently in Europe, had already appeared in the XIVth century, and his name was Petrarch (1304-1374). It was he who first inspired his countrymen with his own admiration of the classic beauties of Virgil and Cicero. The larger portion of his works is written in Latin, and he died under the delusion that his Africa, a Latin poem, was his greatest work. A taste for the cultivation of the Roman classics grew steadily from this period, gaining strength and ardor every day, until it became the absorbing passion of all ranks of scholars. Even Poggio Bracciolini, usually assigned exclusively to the XVth, belongs partially to the XIVth century. So also does Guarino Guarini, the greatest of the early Hellenists.