INTRODUCTION
He was a Florentine citizen—of that Florence with sombre palaces, landform towers, dry undulating hills, sharply defined against a deep blue sky and covered with little black fusiform cypresses and a silver scarf of olivetrees which move like the waves of the sea—of that intensely elegant Florence where the pale, ironic face of Lorenzo de' Medici, and Machiavelli, with his large, cunning mouth, used to meet "La Primavera," and the chlorotic, pale golden-haired Venuses of Botticelli—of that feverish, proud and neurotic Florence which was the prey of every form of fanaticism, which was agitated by every form of religious or social hysteria, where every one was a free man and where every one was a tyrant, where it was so good to live, and where life was a hell—of that city of intelligent, intolerant, enthusiastic and malignant citizens, who possessed tongues that could sting and minds that were full of suspicion, who jealously spied one another and tore each other to pieces—that city where there was no room for the free mind of a Leonardo, where Botticelli ended in the deluded mysticism of a Scotch Puritan; where the goat-like visaged, ardent-eyed Savonarola ordered his monks to dance around a bonfire of works of art, and where, three years later, the pile was raised to burn the prophet.
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