In the mind of our young nobleman there was a double current. He was a Roman, and the traditions of his house went back to the time of Mutius Scævola; and his old nurse had told him often that grand story of how the young hero stood with his right hand in the fire rather than betray his honour. If the legends of Rome’s ancient heroes cause the pulses of colder climes and alien races to throb with sympathetic heroism, what must their power be to one who says, “_These were my fathers?_” Agostino read Plutarch, and thought, “_I_, too, am a Roman!” and then he looked on the power that held sway over the Tarpeian Rock and the halls of the old “Sanctus Senatus,” and asked himself, “By what right does it hold these?” He knew full well that, in the popular belief, all those hardy and virtuous old Romans, whose deeds of heroism so transported him, were burning in hell for the crime of having been born before Christ; and he asked himself, as he looked on the horrible and unnatural luxury and vice which defiled the papal chair and ran riot through every ecclesiastical Order, whether such men, without faith, without conscience, and without even decency, were indeed the only authorized successors of Christ and his Apostles? To us, of course, from our modern stand-point, the question has an easy solution; but not so in those days, when the Christianity of the known world was in the Romish Church, and when the choice seemed to be between that and infidelity. Not yet had Luther flared aloft the bold, cheery torch which showed the faithful how to disentangle Christianity from Ecclesiasticism. Luther in those days was a star lying low in the gray horizon of a yet unawakened dawn. All through Italy at this time there was the restless throbbing and pulsating, the aimless outreach of the popular heart, which marks the decline of one cycle of religious faith and calls for some great awakening and renewal. Savonarola, the priest and prophet of this dumb desire, was beginning to heave a great heart of conflict towards that mighty struggle with the vices and immoralities of his times, in which he was yet to sink a martyr; and even now his course was beginning to be obstructed by the full energy of the whole aroused serpent brood which hissed and knotted in the holy places of Rome.