PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESSES. 29 



civilizing and refining influences failed to reach the masses. Look 

 at Italy, under her reigning popes and princes, talented, learned, and 

 scholastic, and in possession of the best literature and art of the ages ; 

 look at France and Spain and Germany, too, with their Bourbons and 

 Charles the Fifths ; look at England, under her Roses, Plantagenets, 

 and Stuarts — how much advancement was made by those nations in 

 a thousand years? Villari, an Italian historian, in his "Life and 

 Times of Savonarola," gives a glowing picture of Lorenzo de Medici, 

 ruler of the city of Florence from 1469 to 1492. He says, in his first 

 volume, that Lorenzo "was the typical man of his age — all his quali- 

 ties were confined to his intellect; his courteous manners were the 

 result of mental refinement, not of kindness of heart ; his patronage 

 of the learned was born of his passion for culture, and also because he 

 found it a pleasant pastime, and one useful to his influence as a 

 ruler. After hours of strenuous labor over some new law framed to 

 crush any lingering remains of liberty, or after passing some new de- 

 cree of confiscation or sentence of death, he would repair to the 

 Platonic academy and take part in heated discussions on virtue and 

 the immortality of the soul ; then go about the town to sing his ribald 

 songs in the company of dissolute youths and indulge in the lowest 

 debauchery. After this he would return home, receive great scholars 

 at his table, and vie with them in reciting verses and discoursing on 

 the poetic art. All literary men of any note in Florence gathered 

 round Lorenzo. And both at the meetings held in his own house and 

 those of the renowned Platonic academy, his genius shone amidst this 

 chosen band, while his literary culture gained no little nourishment 

 from their intercourse.'" Under him Florence " was a continuous scene 

 of revelry and dissipation." "What was most visible at the time was 

 the general passion for pleasure, the pride of pagan learning, the in- 

 creasingly sensual turn, both of art and literature, under the fostering 

 hand of the man who was master of all in Florence." 



What the historian has depicted in such glowing language as being 

 true in Florence was more or less true of many other cities of Europe. 

 All ranks of society, with glorious exceptions here and there, were in 

 a frenzied condition, gone mad with revelry and rottenness. The cen- 

 turies came and went, and still the pall of the ages hung over man, 

 with but few signs of ever being lifted. Herodotus and Homer, 

 Socrates and Plato, Praxiteles and Phidias, Virgil and Horace, and 

 other mighty names in poetry and art, were read and admired and 

 exalted to the heavens in the midst of revelry and debauchery. 



The end, however, was coming. Near the close of the eighteenth 

 century two almost contemporary events occurred. Like a flash of 

 lightning from a clear sky they startled thinking men. These were 



