Page:Studies in the history of the renaissance (IA studiesinhistor01pategoog).djvu/55

Rh Florence. His end came in 1494, when, amid the prayers and sacraments of Savonarola, he died of fever on the very day on which Charles the Eighth entered Florence, the seventeenth of November, yet in the time of lilies, the lilies of the shield of France, as the people now said, remembering Camilla's prophecy. He was buried in the cloister at Saint Mark's, in the hood and white frock of the Dominican order.

It is because the life of Pico, thus lying down to rest in the Dominican habit, yet amid thoughts of the older gods, himself like one of those comely divinities, reconciled indeed to the new religion, but still with a tenderness for the earlier life, and desirous literally to 'bind the ages each to each by natural piety'—it is because this life is so perfect an analogue to the attempt made in his writings to reconcile Christianity with the ideas of Paganism, that Pico, in spite of the scholastic character of those writings, is really interesting. Thus in the 'Heptaplus, or Discourse on the Seven Days of the Creation,' he endeavours to reconcile the accounts which pagan philosophy had given of the origin of the world with the account given in the books of Moses—the 'Timaeus' of Plato with the book of 'Genesis.' The 'Heptaplus' is dedicated to Lorenzo the Magnificent, whose interest, the preface tells us,