Romola (67 page)

A votive image of Lorenzo, in wax, hung up in the Church of the Annunziata, supposed to have fallen at the time of his death.
Boto
is popular Tuscan for
Voto
.

The phrase used to express the absence of disqualification— i.e., the not being entered as a debtor in the public book—
specchio
.

A sign that such contrasts were peculiarly frequent in Florence, is the fact that Saint Antonine, Prior of San Marco, and afterwards archbishop, in the first half of this fifteenth century, founded the society of Buonuomini di San Martino (Good Men of Saint Martin) with the main object of succouring the
poveri vergognosi
—in other words, paupers of good family. In the records of the famous Panciatichi family we find a certain Girolamo in this century who was reduced to such a state of poverty that he was obliged to seek charity for the mere means of sustaining life, though other members of his family were enormously wealthy.

A play on the name of the Dominicans (
Domini Canes
) which was accepted by themselves, and which is pictorially represented in a fresco painted for them by Simone Memmi.

"Arte di Calimara", "arte" being, in this use of it, equivalent to corporation.

A sum given by the bridegroom to the bride the day after the marriage.
Morgengabe
.

The name given to the grotesque black–faced figures, supposed to represent the Magi, carried about or placed in the windows on Twelfth Night: a corruption of Epifania.

"Beauteous is life in blossom!
And it fleeteth—fleeteth ever;
Whoso would be joyful—let him!
There's no surety for the morrow."

Carnival Song by Lorenzo de' Medici
.

"Quando una donna e grande, ben formata, porta ben sua persona, siede con una certa grandezza, parla con gravita, ride con modestia, e finalmente getta quasi un odor di Regina; allora noi diciamo quella donna pare una maesta, ella ha una maesta."—Firenzuola:
Della Bellezza delle Donne
.

"
La vacca muglia
" was the phrase for the sounding of the great bell in the tower of the Palazzo Vecchio.

The poorer artisans connected with the wool trade— wool–beaters, carders, washers, etcetera.

Savonarola's Sermon, page 350. The sermon here given is not a translation, but a free representation of Fra Girolamo's preaching in its more impassioned moments.

"Se vi pare che io abbia detto poche cose, non ve ne maravigliate, perche le mie cose erano poche e grandi."

He himself had had occasion enough to note the efficacy of that vehicle. "If," he says in the
Compendium Revelationum
, "you speak of such as have not heard these things from me, I admit that they who disbelieve are more than they who believe, because it is one thing to hear him who inwardly feels these things, and another to hear him who feels them not;… and, therefore, it is well said by Saint Jerome, `Habet nescio quid latentis energiae vivae vocis actus, et in aures discipuli de auctoris ore transfusa fortis sonat.'"

The most recent, and in some respects the best, biographer of Savonarola, Signor Villari, endeavours to show that the Law of Appeal ultimately enacted, being wider than the law originally contemplated by Savonarola, was a source of bitter annoyance to him, as a contrivance of the aristocratic party for attaching to the measures of the popular government the injurious results of licence. But in taking this view the estimable biographer lost sight of the fact that, not only in his sermons, but in a deliberately prepared book (the
Compendium Revelationum
) written long after the Appeal had become law, Savonarola enumerates among the benefits secured to Florence, "
the Appeal from the Six Votes, advocated by me, for the greater security of the citizens
."

The old diarists throw in their consonants with a regard rather to quantity than position, well typified by the
Ragnolo Braghiello
(Agnolo Gabriello) of Boccaccio's Ferondo.