i PRAGUE 59 



kindness of heart." It was the last, or nearly the last, 

 spell of happiness that life had in store for him. 



XII 



The court of the Emperor Rudolph II. was at Prague, Prague : 

 in Bohemia ; from there his fame as a Maecenas of the 

 learned, and especially of those who claimed power to 

 read the heavens or to work magic, had spread to many 

 countries. Perhaps Sidney, who had visited him from 

 Elizabeth on the death of Maximilian, may have spoken 

 of him to Bruno : while two of Bruno's friends, the 

 Spanish Ambassador St. Clement and the mathematician 

 Mordentius, were at Prague in 1588. Thither, accord- 

 ingly, he now turned in the hope of settled quarters, 

 introducing himself, as was his frequent habit, with a 

 Lullian work, which he caused to be printed soon after 

 his arrival, and dedicated to the Spanish Ambassador. 1 

 The introductory letter is dated from Prague, June June 10, 

 10, 1588, and is in praise of Lully, whose importance I588 ' 

 to philosophy Bruno values much more highly than his 

 successors have done : it promised at the same time a 

 future work, the Lampas Cabalistica, in which the inner 

 secrets of Lullism were to be more fully revealed. 

 This, so far as we know, never appeared, and Bruno 

 tried to obtain the Emperor's patronage by a mathe- 

 matical work dedicated to him, of somewhat revolu- 

 tionary type " One hundred and sixty articles against 

 the mathematicians and philosophers of the day." The 

 Emperor, however, had few funds to spare for any 

 but the professed astrologists and alchemists in whom 

 lay his real interest not at all scientific, although 

 Tycho Brahe and Kepler profited themselves and the 



1 De Specierum Scrutinio, vide supra, p. 54. 



