The pope at this juncture launched a thundering excommunication against him, and though the seigniory still clung to him and bade defiance to his ecclesiastical persecutors, yet the combination against him gained strength in consequence of the decreasing popularity of democratic sway and the increasing power of the party of the Medici. No longer ruling the tide, he had now to struggle with the billows. This he did right manfully. He neither shrunk from reproach nor abated his testimony. He avowed his willingness to bow to lawful authority lawfully exercised, but averred that when exerted to corrupt and undermine the church, it became "infernal and satanical." At this juncture there appeared on the scene a fanatical champion of the papacy, Francesco de Rouilles. He fiercely assailed Savonarola from the pulpit; he was backed by the Romish clergy; and the fickle multitude began to waver. In this emergency the bold friar wrote to the kings of England and France, and to the king and queen of Spain, urging them to convoke a general council, before whom he pledged himself to appear and justify his proceedings. All, however, was in vain. One of his letters having been intercepted and transmitted to the pope, served to precipitate the crisis. Alexander instantly issued a bull, menacing Florence with interdict and excommunication. Tumults ensued; the adherents of the reformer were overpowered; a furious mob surrounded his convent; and at last his arrest was decreed by the seigniory. He was found by the police in the library of San Marco encompassed by the fraternity, and calmly yielded himself up a prisoner. No fair hearing was granted him, no opportunity of defence. He was tortured; he was thrown into prison. He lingered there, debarred from all intercourse of friends, for more than a month. Still, notwithstanding much spiritual conflict, neither his faith nor his comfort failed. This appears very touchingly in his expositions of the 31st and 51st Psalms, composed during his imprisonment, and afterwards translated and published by the immortal Luther, whom he in many respects resembled, and who looking upon him as in some sort his precursor, eulogized his memory. At last he was sentenced to be first strangled and then burnt. This sentence was carried into execution on the 23d of May, 1498, and his ashes were cast into the Arno. His deportment throughout his last hours was serene and befitting. Ere he quitted his cell, he prayed fervently and received the holy communion. To his confessor he said, "Pray for me, and tell my friends not to be discouraged, but to continue steadfast in my doctrine and to live in peace." After he had been fastened to the pile, the bishop of Pagagnotti proclaimed that he separated him from the church. "You may separate me from the church militant" he calmly replied, implying that he had no power to sever him from the church triumphant. Such was the martyrdom of this great and good man. Great he was, whatever his mistakes; and good, whatever his infirmities. Far in advance of his age, he yet retained many of its superstitions; and whilst a zealous reformer, he was a devoted son of the Church of Rome. Strange to say, within ten years of his death Pope Julius II. ordered Raphael to introduce his portrait amongst the saints and doctors of the church in his renowned picture entitled the Dispute of the Sacrament. At Florence, even to the present day, his memory is odoriferous, and the stranger who visits the convent of San Marco is shown his cell, as a spot once hallowed as an abode of a confessor and a saint.—C. S.
SAWYER, Sir Robert, Attorney-general of England in the reign of Charles II., was educated at Magdalen college, Oxford, where he graduated in 1655. He studied law at the Inner temple, was knighted in 1661, and made attorney-general in 1680. His most memorable service to the tory party was the prosecution of the men concerned in the Rye-house plot. By many whigs he was regarded as the murderer of Russell, and for his creel zeal in urging the execution of Sir Thomas Armstrong, he was after the Revolution excepted from the bill of indemnity, and expelled the house of commons in 1690. Yet he had resigned his office under King James rather than consent to the royal dispensing power, and had ably and successfully defended the seven bishops. The electors of Cambridge restored him to his place in parliament very soon after his expulsion. He died in 1692.—R. H.
* SAX, Adolph Antoine Joseph, a celebrated maker of musical instruments, inventor of the saxophone and the whole modern family of brass instruments called saxtubas, saxhorns, &c., was born at Dinant in 1814. The form of these instruments is borrowed from the figures which we see upon Trajan's pillar at Rome. By the Romans this instrument was sometimes called "tuba," sometimes "buccina," and even "ære recurvo," because it was curved in such a manner that the large part, after passing under the arm of the musician, repassed over his shoulder, and presented the bell in front. The advantage of this form for power of sound in the open air is, that it avoids the elbows, which impair the free propagation of the sonorous waves. Nothing can give an idea of the volume of sound produced by these new acoustic contrivances of the intelligent maker, to whom we owe already so many beautiful inventions. The contra bassos in E flat and B flat possess an unheard-of power. This latter instrument, very easy to play, has forty-eight feet of development in its tube, with a conical diameter well proportioned. It is the giant—the mammoth—of the species.—E. F. R.
SAXE, Maurice, Count of, an eminent general, was born on the 19th October, 1696. He was the natural son of Augustus II., king of Poland and elector of Saxony, and of the Countess von Königsmarck, a Swedish lady. From his early years he displayed great fondness for military pursuits. In 1708, when only twelve years of age, he served in the allied army before Lisle; in 1709 he had a horse shot under him at the siege of Tournay; and he distinguished himself in the same year at the battle of Malplaquet. In 1710 the young soldier accompanied his father to the siege of Stralsund, and displayed an amount of intrepidity which attracted general attention. At the bloody battle of Gadebusch, where he commanded a regiment of cavalry, his courage was displayed most conspicuously, and he had a horse shot under him after he had three times rallied his men and brought them to the charge. When he was only fifteen his mother succeeded in arranging a marriage between him and the countess of Loben, a lady of the same age, and both rich and beautiful. But this union was not of long continuance. His fickle and licentious behaviour made him very unfit for the duties of domestic life, and he contrived to obtain a dissolution of the marriage in 1721. In the midst of his licentious pleasures, however, he never lost sight of his profession; he always carried with him a library of military books, and diligently prosecuted his studies. In 1717 he was present at the siege of Belgrade by Prince Eugene, and shortly after the termination of the campain he went to Paris (1720), where he was cordially welcomed by the duke of Orleans, then regent; and two years later he obtained the command of a regiment, which he disciplined and manœuvred according to a new plan, which made the Chevalier Folard predict his future greatness. He studied, too, with unwearied assiduity, mathematics, mechanics, and the art of attacking fortified places. In 1726, Count Maurice was elected Duke of Courland through the influence of Anna Iwanowna, widow of the late duke, and second daughter of the czar, Iwan Alexiowitz; but the czarina, Catherine I., favoured another candidate, and the united forces of Russia and Poland drove him, after a gallant resistance, from his new dominions in 1729. When the duchess of Courland succeeded to the Russian throne she invited the count to return, and there is no doubt that she intended to share her crown with him; but she was deeply offended by the discovery of an intrigue he was carrying on with one of her ladies, and immediately dismissed him from her court. The death of the king of Poland, his father, in 1733, led to a war between France and Austria. The elector of Saxony, brother of the count, offered him the command of all his forces; but he preferred the French service, and distinguished himself at the battle of Ettlingen and at the siege of Philipsburg, and was rewarded for his gallantry with the rank of lieutenant-general. Peace was concluded in 1736; but the death of the emperor, Charles VI., almost immediately kindled a new war. General Saxe commanded the left wing of the French army, which invaded Bohemia in 1741, and took both Prague and the fortress of Agra by assault in a few days. In 1744 he was made a marshal of France, and commanded the left wing of the army of eighty thousand men which Louis XV. in that year led into Flanders. During this campaign he covered the sieges of Menai, Ypres, and Furness, and by his consummate skill kept in check a hostile army three times as numerous as his own. In the following year the troops in Flanders received large reinforcements; Marshal Saxe was appointed commander-in-chief, and on the 1st of May invested Tournay, one of the strongest fortresses in the Netherlands. To relieve this important city, the allied forces under the duke of Cumberland and Prince De Waldeck attacked the French (11th May) near the village of Fontenoy,
