11-i 



TEE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.— SUPPLEMENT. 



biographer, " was, in this respect, more to their 

 minds than Calvinism." Bruno, in particular, 

 very soon found that there was as much wood for 

 burning heretics at Geneva as at Rome and Na- 

 ples. 



At Geneva, our philosopher-errant was tread- 

 ing on ground which had shortly before been 

 strewed with the ashes of Servetus. At Toulouse 

 — where he obtained a professorship, notwith- 

 standing his antecedents (which were perhaps un- 

 known), and lectured on Aristotle's three books 

 " On the Soul " — he was again treading 01 ground 

 shortly afterward to be strewed with the ashes of 

 Tanini. During two years and a half (for him an 

 unusual interval of repose) there must have been 

 either a lull in the intolerant spirit of his audi- 

 ences, or a pause in the indulgence of his own 

 heretical impulses. It was during that interval 

 that he held some conferences — which came to 

 nothing, like those he afterward held with the 

 papal nuncio at Paris — as to what means could 

 be used to enable him to reenter the order he 

 had quitted. But it was fated that poor Bruno's 

 Dominican frock never should be put on again, 

 save to be stripped off, as preliminary to its 

 wearer being burned at the stake. 



" Our Giordano," says M. Berti, in relating his 

 first sojourn and lectures in Paris, "was the true 

 type and ideal of the free professor of those times. 

 In Toulouse, in Paris, in London, in Oxford, in 

 Wittemberg, in Prague, in Zurich, in Frankfort, 

 he took the professor's chair, and gave lectures, 

 without seeking protection or favor in any quar- 

 ter. He migrates from university to university, 

 opens school against school, and when he encoun- 

 ters any opposition or obstacle he turns his steps 

 elsewhere." In his examination before the Vene- 

 tian Inquisition, Bruno says of himself, " I went to 

 Paris, where I set to work lecturing to make my- 

 self known." The substance of his teaching seems 

 to have had for a main ingredient the Lullian art 

 of memory, mixed up with the physical, meta- 

 physical, and astronomical novelties, which he 

 never failed of introducing in all his lectures, and 

 which never failed to produce scandal and to cre- 

 ate a disturbance. On every subject his powers 

 of improvisation carried his hearers by storm. 

 " He promised," said his biographer, " great 

 things in vague and mysterious language, well 

 calculated to excite curiosity and attention in his 

 audience. Whatever in his utterances was not 

 purposely obscure, was clear, fluent, and impas- 

 sioned. Whatever the intrinsic value of his lect- 

 ures, they gained him great fame in delivery." 

 Every one would like to be shown a royal road to 



knowledge ; and royalty itself, in the person of 

 Henry III. of France, showed a desire, which 

 seems to have been not less fleeting than his 

 other caprices, to make acquaintance with this 

 all-promising professor of occult science. Bruno, 

 as he was seldom sparing of invectives on oppo- 

 nents, so failed not to repay in flattery the capri- 

 cious favors of a patron so far from respectable 

 as the French king of the minions, by extolling 

 him to the skies as " the magnanimous, great, 

 and potent prince, the echoes of whose fame ex- 

 tended to the ends of the earth." 



The first, and it might be said the last, real 

 and substantial patronage (except that of the 

 worthy Frankfort booksellers) ever obtained by 

 poor Bruno was that which he enjoyed in the 

 family of the French embassador in London, 

 Castelnau de Mauvissiere, whose military and po- 

 litical memoirs have made him known to poster- 

 ity. About 1583 Bruno had brought royal let- 

 ters of introduction to that important personage, 

 whose house furnished him, for the first time, 

 an easy and tranquil resting-place, after all the 

 troublous storms which bad tossed his private 

 state, and had rendered literary leisure unattain- 

 able, if not " life unsweet," for he seems to have 

 rather liked living in hot water. All Bruno'3 

 best works were written on the banks of the 

 Thames, under the hospitable roof and liberal 

 protection of the French embassador — the more 

 truly liberal, as M. de Mauvissiere was a devout 

 Roman Catholic, and had no sort of sympathy 

 with Bruno's freethinking and heretical proclivi- 

 ties. There must have been, after all, something 

 that attracted personal regard to our poor phi- 

 losopher-errant, or he could not have made him- 

 self an acceptable inmate in the house of an ex- 

 perienced soldier and statesman, with an accom- 

 plished wife and a cultivated and amiable family. 

 Bruno was excused from attending daily mass in 

 the embassador's house, on the plea that, for the 

 present, he regarded himself as excommunicated ; 

 and he must certainly have restrained his polemi- 

 cal and profane sallies in the house of a man who 

 emphatically disapproved the theological confer- 

 ences held about that time, in France and else- 

 where, with the forlorn hope of putting an end 

 to religious differences. " Religion," said M. de 

 Mauvissiere, " ne se peut bien entendre que par 

 la foy et par humilite," and it was therefore not 

 likely to be learned by disputation. 



Bruno liked London little, with its mud, 

 mobs, and 'prentices — Oxford less. If he pre- 

 sented himself to the notice of the heads of that 

 royally-endowed university in his hose, already 



