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 a parallel 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.
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