'My love is purer than a seraph's sigh....'
Dolfo, meantime, preceding his company, but without his former braggadocio, mounted the stair of the Palazzo dei Medici.
In the dark, silent, and spacious halls of the Medicean palace, where all breathed the solemn grandeur of the past, the children became awestruck. But when the shutters had been flung open, the trumpets had blared, and the drums beat, then the youthful inquisitors scattered themselves through the rooms, shouting and laughing, and singing hymns, and executing the judgment of God on the sins of learning and art, gleefully prying into vanities by the guidance of the Holy Spirit.
Giovanni watched them at work, and noted some who, with frowning foreheads, hands decently folded, and the gravity of judges, paced among the statues of the philosophers and heroes of pagan antiquity. 'Pythagoras, Anaximenes, Heraclitus, Plato, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus,' read one of the boys from the Latin inscriptions on the marble bases.
'Epictetus?' said Federici, with the tone of a profound connoisseur, 'that is the particular heretic who permitted all pleasures and denied the existence of God. He merits burning; 'tis pity he is marble.'
'Never mind,' cried the cross-eyed Pippo, 'we'll have him in to the feast.'
'Nay,' interposed Giovanni; 'you are confounding Epictetus with Epicurus.'
He was too late; down came Pippo's hammer so clean on the philosopher's nose that the boys yelled in admiration.
'Epictetus or Epicurus, it's all one! If it isn't the broth, it's the sippets of bread! They shall all go to the house of the devil,' they cried, quoting Fra Girolamo.
However, contention arose before a picture of Botticelli's. Dolfo declared it was the naked Bacchus pierced by the shafts of love, but Federici, whose eye for 'anathemata' rivalled Dolfo's, examined the picture attentively and pronounced it a portrait of Stephen the proto-martyr.
The children stood round in perplexity, for the attire and the expression of the figure in nowise suggested a saint.
'Don't you believe him!' cried Dolfo; ''tis Bacchus, the abominable Bacchus!'
'You blasphemer!' shouted Federici, raising his crucifix for weapon, and the two boys fell upon each other with such goodwill that their followers could hardly separate them. The picture was left for future consideration.