we know nothing beyond the obvious conjecture of Sidney's biographer, that they were of a nice and delicate nature." * The last of six Dialogues printed at London within two years formed an offering more worthy of the hero of Zutphen. In De gli Eroici Furori' are included seventy-four sonnets and songs describing the vicissitudes of a supersensual passion, connected by a prose commentary, after the manner of Dante in the Vita Nuova,' or of Girolamo Benivieni in his 'Canzoni' on Divine Love.† Bruno is here seen at his best. The ignoble side of him is, for the time, sunk out of sight; the ribaldries and buffooneries of the Spaccio' and the 'Cabala' are forgotten; we hear only the rhythmically expressed aspirations of an heroic' soul, striving, by the exercise of a kind of rapt contemplation akin to the ecstasy of the Neoplatonists, towards a terrestrial paradise of mystic quietism. On the recall of the French ambassador, in September, 1585, Bruno departed in his train to Paris. It would have been impossible for him to remain behind. He had played Teucer to Castelnau's Ajax. With his shafts spent and the broad sheltering shield withdrawn, his enemies would have found him an easy prey. His travels accordingly recommenced. In Paris he prepared a surprise for his future biographers. It might have been thought that the publication of the Spaccio' and the Cabala' marked his final severance from every form of Christianity. Plainly audible, amid the sharp rattle of sarcasms and innuendoes, sounds sullenly through both the Ecrasez l'infâme of a later scoffer. What religion is professed in them is a pantheism of a peculiarly debased type, opening the door wide, with the hearty approval of the author, to fetichism, animal-worship, magical rites, and every other degrading superstition. The human mind, however, includes sometimes as many convolutions as the human brain; and it would appear that, in Bruno's view, the utmost license of his philosophical sallies by no means compromised his theological position. The fact, at any rate, is undoubted that he opened early in 1586 formal negotiations for the removal of the ecclesiastical censures he lay under. They were favourably received, but proved abortive through his invincible repugnance to redintegrate his broken vows. His case was taken up both by the Spanish ambassador, The Spaccio' was furnished with a kind of sequel in the 'Cabala 'del Cavallo Pegaseo,' a poignant satire on unlearned piety. † Bartholmèss, Jordano Bruno,' t. ii. p. 34. 6 Mendoza, and by the papal nuncio; and he received spiritual counsel from Father Alons, a Spanish Jesuit, who insisted,' Bruno related afterwards, upon the necessity of procuring absolution from the papal censure, and that my return to 'the religious life was indispensable; I was likewise notified by him that, being excommunicated, I could not assist at the divine offices, but that I might hear sermons and say my prayers in church.' 6 * C The nugatory result of these parleyings counted with Bruno as a mere temporary check. Sixtus V. was then Pope. The well-known sternness of his character alone deterred the nuncio from writing to intercede for the quasipenitent, whose confidence remained unshaken that, under a more benign sway, his proffered terms would be accepted. He probably looked also to an increase of fame to enable him to dictate them with greater security. Before finally quitting Paris, Bruno threw down the gauntlet to the learning of Europe by an elaborate impeachment, in a hundred and twenty articles, of Aristotle's physical doctrine. The philosophy they embodied, now described as exsurgens, now as resurgens, curiously iliustrated the Horatian prediction-Multa renascentur quæ jam cecidere.' An air of venerable antiquity was ingeniously given to its contentions; startling novelties hobbled forward on crutches lent by Empedocles, Anaxagoras, Thales, Plato, Pythagoras; the novi homines, Copernicus included, were conspicuous by absence; revolution wore the time-honoured garb of reaction. Bruno's cosmical views, not omitting the infinitude and intelligent vitality of the universe, were nevertheless stated without reserve, and so far passed muster with the Sorbonne that the whole of his theses were permitted to be defended from a simply rational point of view. They formed, accordingly, the subject of a solemn disputation in the College of Cambrai on Whit Sunday, 1586, the bare record of which may be animated by the fancy calling up the hot attendant academic excitement, the hurling of syllogisms and invectives, the cracking of logic, the splitting of hairs, and the losing of tempers. With the tumult of the scene still ringing in his ears, Bruno set out towards the Rhine, and matriculated, July 25, at the University of Marburg. He at once sought permission to introduce himself by a public debate, but it was refused ob arduas causas; and the refusal drew down upon the rector a visit, 6 like the swoop of a tornado, from the newly arrived student. His vehement reproaches ended with the demand that his name should be removed from the academic register, as it willingly and speedily was. Yet he had a posthumous revenge. For when fame began to illustrate the name of Giordano Bruno, it was quietly restored to a page which it was thought would look the brighter for including it; and the cancelled erasure still silently records the affront and its tardy reparation. 6 Another German university was tried with better fortune. Wittenberg preserved the traditions of Melanchthon's liberality, and afforded the ambulant philosopher hospitality, repaid in the rhetorical coin so profusely at his command. Entered among its students August 20, 1586, he was permitted, through the influence of Alberico Gentili, already known to him at Oxford, to lecture on Aristotle's 'Organon;' and he took private pupils besides. Mere tranquillity, however, could not long satisfy him; and even that was possibly imperilled by the growth of Calvinistic influences under the new elector. He determined, at any rate, to tap another 'cask,' and on March 8, 1588, delivered a solemn 'valedictory 'oration' before the assembled learning of the Athens of 'Germany'-an oration well worth studying for the inconceivable levity of mind which it betrays. Three years earlier he had denounced Lutheran doctrines as a 'pestilence,' as the mother of every villany,' as a worse than Lernean 'monster, diffusing the fatal poison of a multiform heresy through the veins of unhappy Europe.'* Their propagators merited persecution by heaven and earth, nor claimed 'pity any more than wolves, bears, or serpents.' Now at Wittenberg Luther was the Hercules who went forth singlehanded to encounter the ravening beast, and to raise up the fallen and corrupted age;' while the Papacy, whose clemency he had but lately invoked, and whose authority over his conscience he never ceased to acknowledge, figured as a triple-crowned Cerberus, dragged by the victorious hero from the Styx-enfolded depths of Orcus! His next move was to Prague, and although thalers were scarce with Rudolph II., three hundred of them rewarded the dedication of an obscure little work entitled 'One Hundred and Sixty Theses against the Mathematicians * and Philosophers of the Age.' No further prospect opening, however, its author sped northward to Helmstädt, and enrolled himself, January 13, 1589, among the alumni of the university founded by Duke Julius of Brunswick in 1576. He publicly congratulated himself upon being here 'no longer 'exposed to the fangs of the Roman wolf;' yet things did not go the more smoothly with him. Contentions among the professors, brawls and turbulence among the students, left little room at Helmstädt for the sedate courtship of learning. Over Bruno's head a tempest quickly gathered. His Copernicanism drew down the wrath of the pro-rector, Daniel Hoffmann, a zealot and ultra-rigorist, not less ignorant,' as his courteous antagonist remarked, in grammar than in philosophy, and whose hide was scarcely fit for leather.' The culminating incident of the quarrel was Bruno's solemn excommunication by the pastor Boëthius, the temporal, if not the spiritual, consequences of which were serious. Public discredit and private avoidance must have followed upon the sentence; yet its object struggled on for some months, until the work he had in hand was completed, or bread began utterly to fail. He then quietly disappeared. Neither Hoffmann nor Boëthius, however, escaped scotfree. Designated respectively as the Grammarian and the Priest, their effigies, like waxen images in wizard rites, were hung up as targets for insult in Bruno's poem De Immenso.' Mr. Frith finds it satisfactory to know' that both were subsequently disgraced; and in truth they seem to have fared no better than the serpent who bit Jean Fréron, and died of his poisonous flavour. About the middle of 1590 Bruno emerged into full view at Frankfort. He came in search of the author's indispensable ally—a publisher. A triad of Latin poems, corresponding to the triad of Italian dialogues produced in England, was the fruit of his leisure at Helmstädt. In them the same fundamental tenets assumed a form designed to be more permanent and universal. But among Bruno's rich gifts patience was not numbered; and the lime labor et mora is demanded by Latin hexameters more than by most other styles of writing, as the sine quá non of their prolonged vitality. Giordano Bruno was thought-ridden. A mission transcendently momentous was, he believed, committed to him. He indited with profound conviction the lines Altum, difficilem, rarum perferre laborem, Composition was with him a sacred fury, to be appeased in * Frith, op. cit., p. 202. the manner that most readily presented itself. Subsequent revision occurred to him as little as it occurred to the Sibyl to collect and edit the scattered leaves of her prophecies. Hence even his best works bear the stamp of improvisation. They are swift and spontaneous. The reader is brought by them into the full rush of ideas straight from the brain. But he is oppressed by the tediousness inseparable from prodigality; he is bewildered with redundancies of expression, and offended by the spurious glitter of cheap literary finery. It is true that passages of rare and sterling merit indemnify him; but they are, like glades in a tropical forest, not always easy of access. Faults that are venial in Italian prose become deadly in Latin poetry. Bruno's hatred of pedantry branched out into contempt for grammar and prosody. Grammatici verbis, he exclaimed scornfully, at nobis verba ministrent. In his three didactic poems, De Minimo,' De Monade,' and De 'Immenso,' occur hundreds occur hundreds of lines that might make Quintilian not merely 'stare and gasp,' as on lesser provocation, but absolutely start from his grave. Bruno aimed here at being the Lucretius of the newer time; the Lucretian vocabulary, however, was altogether inadequate to his purposes, and he made no scruple of reinforcing it with words 'Harder, sirs, than Gordon, Colkitto, or Macdonnel, or Galasp.' Hence his metaphysical and cosmological epics, apart from some rare flights of genuine inspiration, are fitter to be explored than to be read. They are storehouses of antiquities and novelties-of manifold reminiscences, bizarre imaginings, half-prophetic anticipations; but involved in a maze of which it is not easy to find the plan, and conveyed in language so harsh and obscure as to constitute rather a defensive panoply than a becoming vesture for the ideas presented. 'De Immenso' must, nevertheless, always be memorable, if for nothing else, for the influence it exercised on Goethe, as 'De Monade' for its suggestions to Leibnitz. • See Brunnhofer in Goethe Jahrbuch,' 1886, p. 241. Completely Brunian are the verses quoted from the Zahme Xenien: ' 'Das Leben wohnt in jedem Sterne; Er wandelt mit den andern gerne Die Kräfte die zur Nacht uns führen, |