This was our first visit to Florence since the government had taken possession of the Dominican church and monastery of San Marco, and opened the latter as a museum to the public in 1869; so that my old jealousy that Frank could gaze at those wonderfully lovely angels of Fra Angelico was now at an end. I do not think there is a cell without some exquisitely devotional painting by the monk‐artist, whose every picture is an embodied meditation and a prayer. We paused long in the two cells where Savonarola had lived and studied and suffered. The old question forced itself upon me as to what had been the real character of that grand, imposing figure, which fills so large a page in the history of Florence—the hard‐featured reformer, the man of relentless will and burning eloquence. Where was the little rift in the flute which jarred that celestial music? Where was the flaw in the gem which spoiled its intrinsic value? And which was the snare in his life which prevented his growing on into heroic virtue? His gifts and graces were immense, and, at one time at least, so supernatural that they seemed at once the guarantee and the pledge that he would die a saint in the highest acceptation of the word. Frank, who has read a great deal about him, written by all sides, is persuaded that it was a form of spiritual pride and dependence on himself that ruined all. Of course, at this distance of time, and judging only from existing documents, no one can say when precisely this began—when the annihilation of self first gave place to an inner complacency; when that heart, covered, as before, with the rude hair‐shirt, began to throb with a secret sentiment of personal satisfaction in the graces God had given. It must have been long, if ever, before those set, stern features began to betray that another spirit had entered into the soul of the ascetic monk, which gradually was tarnishing the purity of his spiritual life. But when the end came, and he bowed to death in its most dreadful form, hurried on by the malignity of his enemies—who, having once laid their hand on their prey, feared lest the mercy of Rome should be enlightened to arrest its own mandate—can any doubt that the man who had done so much in a holy cause, and had so decried the pomp and pride of life, found all the graces attached to a great and accepted sacrifice?