report to being present with the writer to share the spectacle:

"We proceeded to the Tungu-hvezar. As the wind blew the smoke directly upon us, it was not without some danger that we approached them. Having cautiously leaped over a rivulet of boiling water, I took my station in front of the springs; but ere I was aware, I was nearly suffocated with hot and dense vapours, which so closely surrounded me that I could neither see my companion nor how to make my escape from the spot on which I stood. At the distance of only a few yards before me roared no fewer than sixteen boiling cauldrons, the contents of which, raised in broken columns of various heights, were splashing about the margins, and ran with great impetuosity in numberless streamlets, down the precipice on which the springs are situate. What augmented the irksomeness of my situation was the partial darkness in which the whole tract was enveloped, so that it was impossible for me to form any distinct idea of the terrifying operations that were going on before me. After the wind had somewhat abated, the vapours began to ascend more perpendicularly, and I again discovered my companion, who was in no small degree concerned about my safety."

Another very striking spectacle described by Henderson was the appearance presented by the sun at midnight, and the scene, for which no parallel is found in the observation of later writers, must have been inexpressibly grand and magical:--

"Close by, toward the west, lay the Trolla-kyrkia, or Giant's Church,' an ancient volcano, the walls of whose crater rose in a very fantastic manner into the atmosphere, while the lower regions were entirely covered with snow; to the south and east stretched an immense impenetrable waste, enlivened on the one hand by a number of lakes, and in the distance by vast ice moun

tains, whose glass surface, receiving the rays of the midnight sun, communicated a golden tinge to the surrounding atmosphere, while toward the north the long bay of Hrutafiord gradually opened into the ocean. Here the king of day, like a vast globe of fire, stretched his sceptre over the realms of night, divested indeed of his splendour, but more interesting, because more subject to view. The singing of swans on the neighbouring lakes added to the novelty of the

scene."

tion, indeed, interferes with a contemplation of the indescribable majesty of the scene. Evidences of a disaster which figures prominently in Icelandic history are spread around. The desolation is not that of a preAdamite disturbance: signs of its being comparatively recent appear. It is clear also that it involved mankind in its ravages. A few patches of pasture ground struggle up through the intermingled lavas, indicating that the destructive agent did not wreak its vengeance upon the present generation; nevertheless, it is but a short time since 1783, and the story of the great ruin is almost as fresh as if it happened yesterday. About fifty miles back from the sea the borders are reached of the region known as the Skapta Yokul, which human foot has never traversed. The Danish Government have mapped out the island with a minuteness exceeding the Ordnance Survey of Ireland, but no attempt has been made to penetrate this desert space of close on four hundred miles square. It was in the year mentioned that the Skapta Yokul quaked, and burst, and In the beginning of June the volcanic obscured, and devastated the island. agency began to exhibit itself, and a preliminary explosion covered the sea with pumice to the distance of one hundred and fifty miles. The spring ships were delayed in their course, and the eruptions continued for months on the vastest scale. A whirlwind of sulphureous ashes swept over the country, empoisoning the food of man and beast. The lava tore the turf before, rolling downwards in a stream that has been computed variously at from fifty miles in length and fifteen in breadth, to forty in length and seven in breadth. In the huge valley of Skapta the lava is five hundred feet thick, and its general depth on the plain which is covered, one hundred feet. Thousands of acres of the always narrow area of Icelandic pasturage were destroyed. Volcanic dust was perceptible even in the Faroe Islands. Famine and pestilence succeeded, and it has been estimated that 9,000 men, 28,000 horses, 11,000 cattle, and 190,000 sheep, perished. One who visited the island about the opening of the century particularly mentions a greater degree of gravity

in the character of the people, and an aversion to gay amusements, which resulted from this event. This sombre demeanour, however, would seem to have worn off; for both Lord Dufferin and Mr. Baring-Gould found the people as fond of a little rational sport as the men of any other nation.

Nor does it appear that any permanent "revival" of religion was the consequence of this visitation; for in Reykjavik, as elsewhere, the majority among the congregations which assemble from Sunday to Sunday are females.

Ir few of the great names in history shine out with a lustre equally visible to all eyes, there are not a few whose light burns baleful or benign, clear or lurid, according to the gazer's idiosyncrasy, the bent of his early training, or the range of his visual experiences. Englishmen, for instance, are not slow to extol the legislative wisdom of an Alfred, the public virtues of a Wellington, or the patriotic daring of a Nelson. In spite of one clever historian, they have not yet unlearned their old dislike of England's Royal Blue Beard; while another has hitherto failed in winning their full assent to his wearisome apotheosis of Frederick the Great. The belief in Cleon's virtue is still confined to a few thoroughgoing believers in the sound judgment of his last English champion; nor has all the eloquence of many writers done much to soften the old English horror of such a being as Robespierre.

But there are certain classes of great men moulded after a type so strange, uneven, or many-sided, that few can look upon them without being tempted either to worship them overmuch, or to bury them under a weight of yet more unmerited scorn. In gauging the worth of a Cæsar, a Bonaparte, or a Bacon, how ready we are to rush into either extreme, to be utterly dazzled by the great man's intellect, or to harp too long and loud on his moral failings. Yet here, perhaps, the undue disparagement may be pleaded as the protest of an independent few against the blind admiration felt by the many

for success in whatever cause. Very different from these are the men to whom we specially refer. Our feelings, whether of esteem or hatred, for such as Mahomet or Cromwell seem to flow from a source more thoroughly human, to manifest themselves in a way more warmly personal. These men of strong warm hearts and eager imaginations, combined with a very good share of mental prowess, will draw us towards them as personal friends, when once we have ceased to repel them as personal foes. We may love them heartily, or hate them heartily; but look on them with a calm indifference, or even with a curious compassion, we hardly ever can. Seen through the haze of party feeling, of half knowledge, of over heated sympathies, the great Puritan Protector looms on the one hand a spirit of darkness, on the other an angel of pure light. Of such men we are willing enough to believe all good or all evil, according as their natures, aims, and doings, seem to jar against, or harmonize with, our own. But to our love or hatred, our reverence or our scorn, there is commonly no end. If Mahomet is no impostor, let us worship him as a guileless saint. If Knox was anything but a rebellious fanatic, he must surely be ranked among the noblest champions of a thoroughly noble cause.

To do full justice, yet no more than justice, to the character of such men needs at once the wisdom of a Shakespeare, and a heart as large as that of the poet who took farewell of “Auld Nickie," in words of kindly hope for

By Pasquale Villari. London: Longman and

his future amendment. Their mental features seem so human, yet in some phases are so perplexing, that the many are almost sure to judge them wrongly. The schoolmaster who from his prison whined out a letter full of unctuous excuses for having flogged a dull boy to death, may have been only an astounding hypocrite. But are we certain that he was only that? Is it not just as likely that his words may have come from a heart turned crazy from the excess of a fanaticism akin to that displayed by men of far greater historical mark. Wilful hypocrisy has often to answer for the results of mere self-delusion. There is a slight touch of madness in all forms of fierce enthusiasm, from the musical frenzy of a Beethoven to the mystic raptures of a Swedenborg; from the warlike preaching of St. Bernard to the lofty Jeremiads of Savonarola. It is not from temperaments of this class that hypocrites are mostly made. The ways of such men, not being all as ours, cannot be fairly judged from our usual stand points. It is easy to call Mahomet an impostor and the Koran a wilful forgery-but where are the proofs A sounder criticism is content to allow that if ever the prophet knowingly deceived others, he certainly began and ended by deceiving himself.

On the other hand, we have to remember that good faith is no voucher for good deeds. Because Mahomet believed in his mission, and Cromwell offered up heartfelt thanks for the crowning mercy of Dunbar, we are not therefore bound to accept the one as a heaven-sent prophet, or to lavish unchequered praise on every word and deed recorded of the other. No amount of honest zeal can turn a crime into an act of virtue. A fellowfeeling will make us wondrous kind; but, like vaulting ambition, it is very like to send us falling on the other side. The mischief done in this world by blind enthusiasm is untold. In the whole record of human wickedness there is hardly a sin which has not been more than once committed by earnest men, for the greater glory of God. Torquemada burning heretics, Calvin hunting Servetus to a cruel death, Mahomet proclaiming the religion of the sword, Hildebrand usurping the temporal rights of kings

and princes, may all have acted from the strength of a pure enthusiasm; yet, what man of true candour would think of glossing over deeds like these, done in the best faith, by never so earnest champions of the truth? The tree must, after all, be judged by its fruits. Enthusiasts have never been less fallible than any other men, and he who resents the shallow verdiets of an adverse criticism, will yet beware of floundering into overpraise of a class of heroes who, if they have sometimes opened out new worlds of light and beauty, have not seldom led their followers into a land of darkness and despair.

Like other men of kindred genius, the subject of the present article has long been bandied to and fro between the praises of injudicious friends and the blame of prejudiced or mistaken opponents. Misunderstood by his own countrymen, Savonarola fared even worse at the hands of foreign critics. If Bayle flouted him as a low impostor, Rudelbach claimed him as a pioneer of the Protestant Reformation; while Roscoe, as champion of the house of Medici, painted him as a powerful preacher, but an ambitious demagogue. Of late years, however, the memory of the high-souled Florentine has found a careful, if not very eloquent, defender in the Italian writer, whose work, as Englished by Mr. Leonard Horner, now lies before us. It is a pity that so bald a translation of a book on the whole so useful, should have been offered to the English reader. Such as it is, however, its contents are worth mastering by all who would form for themselves a truthlike image of the man who for several years filled towards the Florentines the same high office, which Samuel filled towards his countrymen before there was yet a king in Israel.

Jerome Savonarola was born at Ferrara on the 21st September, 1452. His grandfather, a physician of high repute at Padua, had taken up his abode at Ferrara many years before, on the invitation of the polished Marquis Nicholas III., of Este. His mother, a lady of good birth, was remarkable for blameless morals, commanding intellect, and "an almost masculine strength of mind.” Between these two, the child's education was

carried on for some ten years, when the grandfather dying left his son, Nicholas, to complete the building he had reared so far. Marked out by his family for the profession of medicine, young Jerome was duly fed on the scholastic subtleties of Thomas Aquinas, and on what of Aristotle was then known to the learned of Western Europe. In knowledge of the Greek philosophy he was afterwards to shew himself no common dabbler; but his growing love for the mystic teachings of the angelic doctor" led him away at this time, for days together, from studies more directly useful to an embryo physician. Drawing, music, rhyming, and classic literature made up the round of his boyish pursuits. By nature a quick scholar, of studious habits, high-souled, fond of brooding over the thoughts that seized or sprang from his own rich burning imagination, Jerome probably mixed but seldom in the sports and pastimes dear to children endowed with tougher nerves and harder muscles than himself was likely ever to have owned. In the life that sparkled round him, bright as the sun of his native land, but rotten beyond what Italy had known for centuries back, he saw much to muse over, but far more to loathe. From the gay doings within the palace, from the splendid pageants that served to drown the memory of human blood, shed between whiles in the streets of a city then famous for its crowds and luxury, the pureminded, sensitive dreamer would turn away with instinctive shuddering, with a strangely vivid foretaste of the doom that would surely overtake a people thus lapped in heathenism and all wantonness.

"Heu! fuge crudeles terras, fuge littus avarum," was the cry that fell continually from his lips. Into the ducal palace, so gloomily grand with out, within so gay and gorgeous, his parents even could not persuade him

to go. His sadder thoughts he beguiled by the mournful music of his lute, or breathed out in verses glowing with heartfelt anger and holy scorn. At other times he would pore, like one entranced, over the pages of his beloved St. Thomas, or pass long hours in earnest study of that Holy Writ which became the meat and drink of his later years.

Already in the youth's heart had begun the struggle which all men of like enthusiasm have one day to pass through. As Mahomet prayed and pondered among the caves of Mount Hira, as Luther was crelong praying and battling with the evil one in the lonely Wartburg Castle, so did the young Ferrarese student bear himself amidst the din and splendour of his native town. Frequent fastings, sad reveries, and long prayers, revealed the fierceness of his mental agony, while they encouraged, if they did not beget, the dreams and visions which his overheated fancy clothed in the hues and outlines of heaven itself. How, under kindlier circumstances, the battle might have ended it is hard to say. But one thing seems about this time to have fixed the tenor of his after-life. He had fallen in love with a fair maiden, daughter of a high-born Florentine exile. But a lady of the house of Strozzi scorned to mate herself with a Savonarola; and the rejected lover found himself torn for ever from the one tie that might still have bound him to a purely secular career. Thenceforth the world grew altogether hateful to a youth whose earthly happiness had all been staked on that one fatal venture. He fell back on his prayers and fastings for the solace denied him elsewhere. Religion became the mistress of his future life.

His great love for Thomas Aquinas inspired him with a secret wish to don the cowl of a Dominican friar. As a member of the great preaching brotherhood founded by St. Dominic in the days of Innocent III., he might also hope to make his voice heard to some good purpose in a city which seemed in its wickedness to rival Sodom and Gomorrah. But, after his mind was fairly made up, it cost him a whole year of hard inward struggle before he could bring himself to take the irrevocable step which would carry him for ever away from his home and dear ones.

At length, in April, 1475, in the twenty-third year of his age, Savonarola set out from his father's house, and gained admission into a Dominican convent at Bologna. His first thought after his arrival was to write his father a long letter, full of loving entreaty and earnest pleading, in excuse

of a flight so sudden and seemingly secret. His own sorrow at leaving his parents was even greater, he virtually said, than theirs could be at losing him. But he prayed his father, as "a man of firm mind," to judge for himself dispassionately, and "by reason alone," whether his son had done rightly in flying from a world of sin to become a soldier of Jesus Christ. If he loved his son truly, he should rather rejoice at that son's obedience to the commands of his Heavenly Father, who had pointed out to him this only way of escape from a world of wickedness, from a very "sink of infamy." Little as such pleading might satisfy those who doubt if fly ing to the cloister be the best way of serving God, it may have helped to lull the storm of a parent's sorrow, while it certainly went near to show the deep simplicity of the writer's faith in himself and his close communion with the world above. Whatever murmurs may have reached him in reply to his first letter were, doubtless, silenced after the receipt of another, in which the renewed expression of his unchangeable resolve was backed up by earnest chiding of his parents for their blindness to the honour thus freely bestowed by Heaven upon their son.

In the Bolognese monastery, Savonarolo passed the first seven years of his monkish life. Living at first in the closest privacy, with all the selfpunishing sternness of a Dominic, he was erelong bidden to exchange his menial duties for the task of teaching his brother novices. Loath at the first to leave the solitude and shorten the penances of his own choosing, he soon learned to delight in impressing on other minds a knowledge of the truths by which his own was stirred. His success in teaching was quickly rewarded by fresh promotion; but his earliest attempts at preaching seem to have met with small acknowledgment outside the walls of his own monastery. Was his style too artless or his matter wanting in worldly interest? That he satisfied his own superiors, may be gathered from their sending him, in 1482, to preach at Ferrara. Here, again, his preaching seems to have made no general stir. His hearers were either loath to believe in the

merits of their mean-looking fellowtownsman, or unaccustomed to his peculiar style of oratory. Perhaps, too, they had little time to do him justice, for the same year saw him depart for the last time from his native city and the familiar faces of his youth. The war which was erelong to light up all Italy, had begun to crackle about Ferrara; and Savonarola was ordered to take up his abode in the monastery of St. Mark, at Florence, the destined theatre of his greatest triumphs and his headlong fall.

When the wicked Pope Sixtus IV. was conspiring with the Venetians to gratify their mutual lust of power at the cost of other Italian princes, Florence was basking in careless ease under the splendid-seeming sway of Lorenzo the Magnificent. The crafty grandson of the great Duke Cosmo belonged to that class of lucky tyrants whose evil deeds are obscured by their success in pandering to the lower wants of the unlearned many, and beguiling the artistic sympathies of the cultivated few. A finished libertine, a ruthless tyrant, a wasteful guardian of the public purse, he feasted his subjects with endless shows and sports, wrote the coarse verses they sang at carnival time, and made Florence beautiful with masterpieces of monumental art. If freedom sickened and died out beneath the spells of so cunning a Circe, the fine arts and the new learning at any rate throve apace under a ruler trained in all the accomplishments of his day; among whose bosom friends were Pulci and Politian; at whose table sat young Michael Angelo; whose guide in philosophy, the learned Marsilio Ficino, became the head of his new Platonic Academy, and listened, perhaps with genuine delight, to the brilliant talk and bold speculations of his former pupil. During the reign of this Florentine Mecænas, Florence became the central resort for scholars of almost every nation, who flocked to hear Ficino expound, in a heathen tongue, his somewhat heathenish amendments on the old Greek philosophy. The classic culture which the Greek exiles from Constantinople had already made the fashion throughout Italy, gave its own colour to the growing