96 GIORDANO BRUNO PART 



heaven. This must have happened in Bruno's case, for 

 there is no mention of will or of burial in the report. 

 Its date is Thursday, i6th February (an error for lyth), 

 and it reads thus : l " At the second hour of the night 

 it was intimated to the Company that an impenitent 

 was to be executed in the morning ; so at the sixth hour 

 the comforters and the chaplain met at St. Ursula, and 

 went to the prison of the Tower of Nona. After the 

 customary prayers in the chapel there was consigned to 

 them the under-mentioned condemned to death, viz. 

 Giordano, son of the late Giovanni Bruno, an Apostate 

 Friar of Nola in the Kingdom, an impenitent heretic. 

 With all charity our brethren exhorted him to repent, 

 and there were called two Fathers of St. Dominic, two 

 of the Society of Jesus, two of the new Church, and 

 one of St. Jerome, who, with all affection and much 

 learning, showed him his error, but he remained to the 

 end in his accursed obstinacy, his brain and intellect 

 seething with a thousand errors and vanities. So, per- 

 severing in his obstinacy, he was led by the servants of 

 justice to the Campo dei Fiori, there stripped, bound 

 to a stake, and burnt alive, attended always by our 

 Company chanting the litanies, the comforters exhort- 

 ing him up to the last point to abandon his obstinacy, 

 but in it finally he ended his miserable, unhappy life." 



So Bruno passed away ; his ashes were scattered, his 

 name almost forgotten. His death was the merest 

 incident amid the great doings of the year of Jubilee. 

 None of the many bishops and cardinals and dis- 

 tinguished visitors in Rome, with the single exception 

 of Gaspard Schopp, makes any mention of the occur- 

 rence or of the man ; and Schopp did so only because 



1 Pognisi, Giordano Bruno e FArchivio di San Giovanni Decollate, Torino, 1891, and 

 vol. iii. of Op. Lat, introd. 



