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A very fine description of Savonarola is introduced by one of our great novelists, George Eliot, in the story of “Romola.” Referring to his martyrdom, she says:

Power rose against him not because of his sins but because of his greatness, not because he sought to deceive the world but because he sought to make it noble. And through that greatness of his he endured double agony: not only the reviling and the torture and the death-throe, but the agony of sinking from the vision of glorious achievement into that deep shadow where he could only say, “I count as nothing: darkness encompasses me: yet the light I saw was the true light.”

A. P.

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William of Orange of Nassau, or William the Silent as he is known, was an extraordinarily interesting man, if only from the fact that everything about him, from his titles and his circumstances to his character, was a contradiction. For one thing, the name “Silent” gives quite a wrong impression of him. It sounds as though he might have been taciturn, shy, or difficult to get on with, but he happened to be particularly easy and sympathetic, delightful as a companion, and eloquent in speech. How this misnomer came about will be related later.