Note 1 — Chapter LVIII · A Final Understanding.

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.”