anism was so gratifying, that he styled Würtemberg the Athens of Germany. "Your justice," he writes to the Senate, "has refused to listen to the insinuations circulated against my character and my opinions. You have, with admirable impartiality, permitted me to attack with vehemence that philosophy of Aristotle which you prize so highly." For two years did he teach there with noisy popularity, yet on the whole with tolerable prudence, in not speaking against the peculiar views of Lutheranism. He even undertook a defence of Satan; but whether in that spirit of pity which moved Burns, or whether in the spirit of buffoonery which delights to play with awful subjects, we have no means of ascertaining. He did not offend his audience, in whatever spirit he treated the subject.

Here, then, in Würtemberg, with admiring audiences and free scope for discussion, one might fancy he would be at rest. Why should he leave so enviable a position? Simply because he was not a man to rest in ease and quiet. He was possessed with the spirit of a reformer, and this urged him to carry his doctrines into other cities. Characteristic of his audacity is the next step he took. From Würtemberg he went to Prague; from the centre of Lutheranism to the centre of Catholicism! In this he had reckoned too much on his own powers. He met with neither sympathy nor support in Prague. He then passed on to Helmstadt, where his fame having preceded him, the Duke of Brunswick conferred upon him the honorable charge of educating the hereditary Duke. Here again, if he had consented to remain quiet, he might have been what the world calls "successful;" but he was troubled with convictions-things so impedimental to success!-and these drew down upon him a sentence of excommunication. He justified himself, indeed, and the sentence was removed; but he was not suffered to remain in Helmstadt; so he passed to Frankfort, and there in quiet, brief retirement, published three of his Latin works. Here a blank occurs in his annals. When next we hear of him he is at Padua.

After an absence of ten years, the wanderer returns to Italy.

In his restless course, he has traversed Switzerland, France, England, and Germany; his hand against every man, and every man's hand against him. Heretic and innovator, he has irritated the clergy without securing the protection of philosophers. He has sought no protection but that of truth. That now he should choose Padua above all places, must ever excite our astonishment. Padua, where Aristotle reigns supreme! Padua, which is overshadowed by Venice and the Inquisition! Was he weary of life, that he thus marched into the camp of his enemy? or did he rely on the force of his convictions and the vigor of his eloquence to triumph even in Padua? None can say. He came -he taught he fled. Venice received him, but it was in her terrible prison. Lovers of coincidences will find a piquant illustration in the fact, that at the very moment when Bruno was thrown into prison, Galileo opened his course of mathematics at Padua; and the six years in which Galileo occupied that mathematical chair, were the six years Bruno spent in miserable captivity.

He has writ

Bruno's arrest was no sooner effected, than intimation of it was sent to the Grand Inquisitor San Severina, at Rome, who ordered that the prisoner should be sent to him, under escort, on the first opportunity. Thomas Morosini presented himself before the Savi of Venice, and demanded, in the name of his Eminence, that Bruno should be delivered up to him. “That man,” said he, "is not only a heretic, but an heresiarch. ten works in which he highly lauds the Queen of England and other heretical princes. He has written diverse things touching religion, which are contrary to the faith." The Savi, for some reason or other, declined to give up their prisoner, saying the matter was too important for them to take a sudden resolution. Was this mercy? Was it cruelty? In effect, it was cruelty; for Bruno languished six years in the prisons of Venice, and only quitted them to perish at the stake. Six long years of captivity-worse than any death. To one so ardent, solitude itself was punishment. He wanted to be among men, to combat, to argue, to live; and he was condemned to the fearful solitudes of that prison, without

books, without paper, without friends. Such was the repose which the weary wanderer found on his native soil.

His prison doors were at length opened, and he was removed to Rome, there to undergo a tedious and fruitless examination. Of what use was it to call upon him to retract his opinions? The attempt to convince him was more rational; but it failed. The tiresome debate was needlessly prolonged. Finding him insensible to their threats and to their logic, they brought him, on the 9th of February, to the palace of San Severino; and there, in the presence of the cardinals and most illustrious theologians, he was forced to kneel and receive the sentence of excommunication. That sentence passed, he was handed over to the secular authorities, with a recommendation of a "punishment as merciful as possible, and without effusion of blood”—the ut quam clementissimè et citra, sanguinis effusionem puniretur— the atrocious formula for burning alive.

Calm and dignified was the bearing of the victim during the whole of this scene. It impressed even his persecutors. On hearing his sentence, one phrase alone disturbed the unalterable serenity of his demeanor. Raising his head with haughty superiority, he said, "I suspect you pronounce this sentence with more fear than I receive it." A delay of one week was accorded to him, in the expectation that fear might force a retractation; but the week expired, and Bruno remained immovable. He perished at the stake; but he died in the martyr spirit, self-sustained and silent, welcoming death as the appointed passage to a higher life.

"Fendo i cieli e a l' infinito m' ergo."

Bruno perished, the victim of intolerance. It is impossible to read of such a punishment without strong indignation and disgust. There is, indeed, no page in the annals of mankind which we would more willingly blot out, than those upon which fanaticism has written its bloody history. Frivolous as have often been the pretexts for shedding blood, none are more abhorrent to us than those founded upon religious differences. Surely the

question of religion is awful enough in itself! Men have the deepest possible interest in ascertaining the truth of it; and if they cannot read the problem aright by the light of their own convictions, will it be made more legible by the light of an autoda-fé? Tolerance is still far from being a general virtue; but what scenes of struggle, of violence, and of persecution, has the world passed through, before even the present modicum of tolerance could be gained! In the sixteenth century, free thought was a crime. The wisest men were bitterly intolerant; the mildest, cruel. Campanella tells us that he was fifty times imprisoned, and seven times put to the torture, for daring to think otherwise than those in power. It was, indeed, the age of persecution. That which made it so bloody, was the vehemence of the struggle between the old world and the new-between thought and established dogma-between science and tradition. In every part of Europe-in Rome itself-men uprose to utter their new doctrines, and to shake off the chains which enslaved human intellect. It was the first great crisis in modern history, and we read its progress by the bonfires lighted in every town. The glare of the stake reddened a sky illumined by the fair auroral light of Science.

Did Bruno deserve to die? According to the notions of that age, he certainly did; though historians have, singularly enough, puzzled themselves in the search after an adequate motive for so severe a punishment. He had praised heretical princes; he had reasoned philosophically on matters of faith-properly the subjects of theology; he had proclaimed liberty of thought, and investigation; he had disputed the infallibility of the Church in science; he had propagated such heresies as the rotation of the earth, and the infinity of worlds; he had refused to attend Mass; he had repeated many buffooneries then circulating, which threw contempt upon sacred things; finally, he had taught a system of Pantheism, which was altogether opposed to Christianity. He had done all this; and whoever knows the sixteenth century, will see that such an innovator had no chance of escape. Ac

cordingly, the flames (as Scioppius sarcastically wrote in describing the execution to a friend)" carried him to those worlds which he imagined."

"As men die, so they walk among posterity," is the felicitous remark of Monckton Milnes; and Bruno, like many other men, is better remembered for his death than for any thing he did while living. The flames which consumed his body have embalmed his name. He knew it would be so--" La morte d' un secolo fa

vivo in tutti gli altri."

Considered as a system of philosophy, we cannot hesitate in saying that Bruno's has only an historical, not an intrinsic value. Its condemnation is written in the fact of its neglect. But taken historically, his works are very curious, and stil! more so when we read them with a biographical interest; for they not only illustrate the epoch, but exhibit the man-exhibit his impetuosity, recklessness, vanity, imagination, buffoonery, his thoroughly Neapolitan character, and his sincere love of truth. Those who wish to see grave subjects treated with dignity, will object to the license he allows himself, and will have no tolerance for the bad taste he so often displays. But we should rather look upon these works as the rapid productions of a restless athlete-as the improvisations of a full, ardent, but irregular mind, in an age when taste was less fastidious than it has since become. If Bruno mingled buffooneries and obscenities with grave and weighty topics, he therein only follows the general license of that age; and we must extend to him the same forgiveness as to Bembo, Ariosto, Tansillo, and the rest. Plato himself is not wholly exempt from the same defect.

In adopting the form of dialogue, Bruno also followed the taste of his age. It is a form eminently suited to polemical subjects; and all his works were polemical. It enabled him to ridicule by turns the pedants, philosophers, and theologians; and to enunciate certain doctrines which even his temerity would have shrunk from, had he not been able to place them in the mouth of another. He makes his dialogues far more entertain