Nowhere did the aristocracy maintain so much of feudal magnificence and chivalrous enjoyment.

The square castle of red brick, which still stands in the middle of the town, was thronged with poets, players, fools who enjoyed an almost European reputation, court flatterers, knights, pages, scholars and fair ladies.

But beneath its cube of solid masonry, on a level with the moat, shut out from daylight by a sevenfold series of iron bars, lay dungeons in which the objects of the Duke's displeasure clanked chains and sighed their lives away.[2] Within the precincts of this palace the young Savonarola learned to hate alike the worldly vices and the despotic cruelty against which in after-life he prophesied and fought unto the death.
[1] In this chapter on Savonarola I have made use of Villari's _Life_ (translated by Leonard Horner, Longmans, 1863, 2 vols.), Michelet's _Histoire de France_, vol.vii., Milman's article on Savonarola (John Murray, 1870), Nardi's _Istoria Fiorentina_, book ii., and the _Memoirs_ of De Comines.
[2] See p.

424.
Of his boyhood we know but little.

His biographers only tell us that he was grave and solitary, frequenting churches, praying with passionate persistence, obstinately refusing, though otherwise docile, to join his father in his visits to the court.