It is clear that there was little of gentility in Giordano's early associations. Nola was still a wealthy commercial

centre. Lives of refined ease as well as of ostentatious luxury flowed on there generation after generation. Yet, far apart from the simple existence in Santo Paolo, Giordano carried away with him from his home recollections, not of fine folks dwelling in 'palazzi,' but of one Franzino, a poor melon seller; of mastro Danese,' the local tailor; of Paolino, a tavern keeper; of the widow Caterina, who did 'charing' (as we should now phrase it) at a few soldi a day; above all, of Monte Cicala, verdant with myrtle and vine, oranges and mulberries, and of Vesuvius, menacingly beautiful in the distance.

At the age of ten young Bruno was sent to Naples to pursue his studies. His uncle was a weaver of velvets there, so that he was not cast friendless on the world; and he found congenial teachers in two Augustinian friars, who instructed him in all the branches of a polite education as then understood. They certainly met with an apt pupil. Love of knowledge was from first to last his predominant passion. It awakened in him from his tenderest years. It never left him until the darkness covered him up out of sight. He was like one who has seen a vision, and sets out on a lifelong quest. Hence, in all probability, his premature and unfortunate resolution of entering the Dominican order.

The cloister afforded at that time opportunities for the cultivation of learning not readily to be found elsewhere. Unlimited peaceful leisure replaced within its shelter the turbulent ambitions, the absorbing and dreary necessities of the outside world. Towards such a haven studious spirits were naturally attracted, in some cases even in boyhood. Bruno was not yet fifteen when, with the name of Giordano (for he had hitherto borne his baptismal name of Filippo), he assumed the black and white robes at San Domenico in Naples.

6

The convent itself,' Mr. Frith remarks, wears an enticing aspect for the lover of study. It stands among palaces upon a hill, its antique front turned towards the city, and flanked by spacious perfumed gardens with cloisters running round their outer sides. Meditation seems to wait upon the age and silence of the spot, which bears the imprint of ten centuries on its strong walls and solitary cells. Three hundred years before, Aquinas had watched the incomparable aspect of Naples daily brighten and grow dim from the spot where Bruno now waited on his destiny. The presence of the angelic doctor still lingers in the ancient pile. In his cell, which is now a chapel, he first designed the system of religious

philosophy which he taught, sitting in a hall on the right of the convent church. The church itself, one of the most beautiful in Naples, is full of historic tombs, embellished by hands which lend another lustre to immortality; and above the altar is the crucifix, which it is said. held converse with the saint, and manifested its approval of his doctrines.'

Bruno never lost the reverence for St. Thomas imbibed from the close study of his works here on the spot where they were written. He even pardoned him his Aristotelianism for the sake of the noble reasonableness of the method of its unfolding. Little enough was sacred to him; scoffs and jibes and winged shafts of irony flew from him, right and left, and struck anywhere between Olympus and Hades; but before the Angel of the Schools he was always gravely respectful.

In 1564, after the usual year of probation, he took the Vows. But already thoughts and passions were seething in him which would have matured better anywhere than beneath a cowl. His orthodoxy soon began to be suspected; a menaced trial appears, however, to have been a brutum fulmen. A paper setting forth certain acts of indevotion by which he had scandalised the community, drawn up as he averred long afterwards-merely for purposes of intimidation, was torn the same day. Yet the lesson had its effect. Bruno was rendered, we conclude, more circumspect, for he was admitted to priest's orders at the usual age, in 1572. He sang his first Mass in the convent of San Bartolommeo, at Campagna, a little town nestled at the foot of the Apennines behind Salerno; and, emancipated now from any close control, he travelled from one Dominican convent to another, exploring the treasures of their libraries, while discharging the duties of his sacred office.

Nevertheless, he was no longer a Catholic Christian. Judged by the standard of an ordinary untutored conscience, he was perjured at the instant of being ordained. He distinguished, it is true-and there is some evidence that the distinction was made in good faith-between theological and philosophical convictions; he cultivated, not unsuccessfully, a curious sort of double moral consciousness, with results highly perplexing to the student of his character. The broad fact, however, remains that, by his own account, he had doubted the doctrine of the Trinity from his eighteenth year; while, in the system of thought and being his eager intellect busied itself in preparing the Christian revelation had no place.

The kingdom of Naples was just then infected with an epidemic of anti-Trinitarian opinions. Indeed, most of the Italian reformers were of the Socinian type. Melanchthon was dismayed at the prevalence among them of this particular form of heresy, and attributed it to the influence of Platonism. Calvin drew up a confession of faith which the members of the Italian church at Geneva were compelled to sign, by way of attesting and safeguarding their orthodoxy. In this particular, then, Bruno only drifted with a strong current of freethought already flowing.

During ten years, however, he drifted without giving a sign whither a circumstance truly surprising, regard being had to the hot, outspoken nature of the man. It was not until 1576 that his dangerous secret began to leak out. His expression of Arian views in conversation led, in that year, to the recommencement of proceedings against him, this time of too serious a character to be treated lightly. While they were still pending, the object of them fled to Rome, and took refuge in the convent of the Minerva; then, hearing that the cause was about to be transferred to the papal courts, he cast aside his monk's habit, and took ship for Genoa.

He had now finally broken with his old life; but it had left its mark upon him. From long dissimulation, he had contracted a habit of interior duplicity by which the alternate expression, with apparent sincerity, of views wholly irreconcileable, was made possible to him. He brought away with him, too, a stock of wrath and bitterness keenly effective in the ironical controversies by which he revenged the compulsion to hypocrisy laid upon him by the course he had chosen.

His profession was henceforth, as he described it, 'of 'letters and of every science.' It must be admitted that he was rarely equipped for its pursuit. His thirteen years of seclusion had been turned to the uttermost account for purposes of curious study. He had not only read widely, but he had read with the fervour of one who appropriates what he reads. The process was with him rather a means for the transfusion of thought than for the bare acquisition of knowledge. His memory, besides, was extraordinary. Quotations, allusions, erudite ornaments of all kinds, overflowed from his pen; yet he must often have written with few or no books at hand to refer to. More powerfully than by any other authors, his thoughts had been swayed by Raymond Lully, Cardinal Cusa, and Copernicus; but innumerable other influences had acted upon them with effect. He was

nurtured on Aristotle, St. Thomas, and Albertus Magnus; the dialogues of Plato were familiar to him, most likely in the noble translation of Marsilio Ficino; Plotinus and Proclus, Al Ghazzali and Averroes, with the whole range of Cabalistic and Rabbinical writers, contributed severally to his stock of ideas; Telesius and Porta inspired him with respect for experimental science; Virgil, Lucretius, Lucian, Dante vivified his imagination, and supplied models for imitation or parody. Nor did he neglect recent native literature. He lived and moved in the intellectual atmosphere formed by it; indeed, the vicious peculiarities which at times disfigure his prose style have been traced by Mr. Symonds to his mischievously close study of the works of the illfamed Aretino.*

Bruno, it must be remembered, was a poet before he became a philosopher. His first call was from the Muses. Most of the sonnets and verses subsequently interspersed through his dialogues were probably composed during the monastic phase of his life. His comedy Il Candelajo' almost certainly was. This in itself is a somewhat startling fact. So choice a flower of licentious literature surely never unfolded, before or since, within the shadow of a cloister. It is enough to say of it that, in barefaced contempt for decorum, whether of expression or situation, it comes well up to the flood-tide mark left in the drama of the Renaissance by the 'Mandragola' of Macchiavelli, and the 'Cortigiana' of Aretino. Undoubtedly it has merit, though by no means of the highest kind. It is spontaneous and racy of the soil-a successful piece of buffoonery carried out with untiring vivacity for the benefit of spectators, whose sense of humour is presumed to be satisfied by witnessing the indefatigable perpetration of practical jokes. It is, in short, a comedy, not of the closet, but of the streets, and of the streets of Naples. Its drollery has the rough Oscan flavour, something of which still survives in the perpetually varied sound of Pulcinella's grotesque experiences. Just such knaveries as are played off, just such cudgellings as are administered in its scenes (only brought within stricter limits of propriety), nightly delight the lively audiences of the San Carlino. And the cudgellings are dealt round in both places with an equal disregard of equity and moral purpose. By far the hardest lot falls to the share of very much the most estimable person in the play. Poor Manfurio's sole, but unpardonable, and by stick or strap incurable

Renaissance in Italy: Catholic Reaction, pt. ii. p. 197.

vice, consists in his irrelevant Latinity. Yet it is visited with condign punishment, while the villains who decree and execute it come off triumphant, amid the jubilant applause of the spectators. Il Candelajo' formed part of the scanty belongings with which Bruno left his convent. It was printed at Paris in 1582 with the motto In tristitia hilaris, in hilaritate tristis; was adapted into French in 1633, and imitated in Cyran de Bergerac's Pédant joué.'

In the spring of the year 1576, then, Giordano-or, as he now again for a short time called himself, Filippo-Bruno set out upon his wanderings, his thoughts and projects ripening as he went. He began modestly enough. After three days spent in Genoa, he retired to Noli, a picturesque little town on the Riviera di Ponente, where he earned his bread during some four or five months by teaching grammar to boys, and lecturing on the Sphere ' to more advanced pupils. Although his astronomical convictions were attained only by degrees, there is reason to believe that he was by this time an ardent Copernican; so that the gentiluomini' of Noli doubtless caught glimpses, through golden doors' flung wide, of an improved and enlarged universe.

Meeting no encouragement either at Savona or Turin, the philosophical adventurer embarked upon the Po, and floated down to Venice. He arrived at an unlucky moment. The plague had in that year carried off half the population, including Titian; and, though its fury was spent, the ordinary activities of life were still depressed by anxiety; schools and lecture rooms had scarcely yet reopened; printing presses were only just resuming work; the literary market was flat and languid. Lodging obscurely in the Frezzaria, Bruno barely managed to defray some weeks' expenses with the proceeds of sale of a little book on The Signs of the 'Times,' which, having served its purpose of keeping the body and soul of its author temporarily together, duly descended into oblivion.

From Venice he proceeded to Padua, and thence to Brescia, where he had a singular adventure. A crazy monk had been thrown into prison as possessed. He had all at once laid claim to a gift of prophecy, attended by a surprising accession of theological and linguistic knowledge. Bruno saw him, and administered a potion which, in his cynical phrase, restored him to being as great an ass 'as before.'

* Berti, 'Vita di Giordano Bruno,' p. 75.