bonfire of the vanities

For the wild licence of the Carnival, for the Pagen pageantry that the Medicean princes had loved, for the sensual songs that had once floated up from every street of the City of Flowers — there were now bonfires of the vanities in the public squares; holocausts of immoral books, indecent pictures, all that ministered to luxury and wantonness (and much, too, that was very precious! ); there were processions in nonour of Christ and His Mother, there were new mystical lauds and hymns of divine love.