Convents in the Middle Ages were the retreats of multitudes, of different natures, who did not wish to live in a state of perpetual warfare and offence, and all the elegant arts flourished under their protecting shadows. Ornamental gardening, pharmacy, drawing, painting, carving in wood, illumination, and calligraphy, were not unfrequent occupations of the holy fathers, and the convent has given to the illustrious roll of Italian art some of its most brilliant names. No institution in modern Europe had a more established reputation in all these respects than the convent of San Marco in Florence. In its best days, it was as near an approach to an ideal community, associated to unite religion, beauty, and utility, as ever has existed on earth. It was a retreat from the commonplace prose of life into an atmosphere at once devotional and poetic; and prayers and sacred hymns consecrated the elegant labours of the chisel and the pencil, no less than the more homely ones of the still and the crucible. San Marco, far from being that kind of sluggish lagoon often imagined in conventual life, was rather a sheltered hotbed of ideas—fervid with intellectual and moral energy, and before the age in every radical movement. At this period, Savonarola, the poet and prophet of the Italian religious world of his day, was Superior of this convent, pouring through all the members of the Order the fire of his own impassioned nature, and seeking to lead them back to the fervours of more primitive and evangelical ages, and in the reaction of a worldly and corrupt Church was beginning to feel the power of that current which at last drowned his eloquent voice in the cold waters of martyrdom. Savonarola was an Italian Luther—differing from him as the more ethereally strung and nervous Italian differs from the bluff and burly German; and like Luther he became in his time the centre of every living thing in society about him. He inspired the pencils of artists, guided the councils of statesmen, and, a poet himself, was an inspiration to poets. Everywhere in Italy the monks of his Order were travelling, restoring the shrines, preaching against the voluptuous and unworthy pictures with which sensual artists had desecrated the churches, and calling the people back by their exhortations to the purity of primitive Christianity.