i TOULOUSE (1579-81) 17 



done so owing to his excommunication, but that he 

 was unconscious of any want of sympathy towards the 

 Catholic Church is shown by his visit in Toulouse to 

 the confessional of a Jesuit. 



The city was not generally favourable to heretics, and 

 in 1 6 1 6 Lucilio Vanini was burnt there for his opinions. 

 A cancelled phrase in the evidence suggests that Bruno's 

 departure from Toulouse was owing to disputes and 

 difficulties regarding his doctrine, but his alleged reason 

 was the civil war that was then raging in the south of 

 France, with Henry of Navarre in the field. While at 

 Toulouse, Bruno seems to have completed a work in 

 more than one volume, the Clavis Magna, or " Great 

 Key," a general, and as Bruno thought, a final text- 

 book on the art of memory : u All the ideas of 

 the older writers on this subject (so far as we are able 

 to make out from the books that have come to our 

 hands), their doctrines and methods, have their fitting 

 place in our invention, which is a superlatively pregnant 

 one, and has appropriated to it the book of the Great 

 Key." One volume only, it appears, was published by 

 Bruno, and that in England, the Sigillus Sigillorum. 



To Paris Bruno came about the close of 1581, and 

 almost at once sprang into fame. A course of thirty 

 lectures on " The thirty divine attributes " (as given by 

 Thomas Aquinas) brought him the offer of an ordinary 

 professorship, but this he could not take, being unable 

 to attend mass. However, his fame reached the ears 

 of the king, Henry the Third, who summoned him to 

 his presence, to know among other things " whether the 

 memory Bruno had, and the art of memory he professed, 

 were natural or due to magic." Bruno proved to him 

 that a powerful memory was a natural product, and 



1 Vide De Umbris (Op. Lot. ii. I. p. 65, cf. p. 87). 



C 



