ii TOLAND 349 



to read Bruno's Spaccio before making reflections upon 

 it. Contrary to his expectations, for Bruno was " a 

 professed atheist, with a design to depreciate religion," 

 he found " very little danger " in it. This did not 

 prevent him from taking Bruno as a text for a 

 would-be humorous disquisition on Atheism. It was Toiand. 

 John Toiand, 1 the " poor denizen of Grub Street," and 

 once famous, or infamous, author of Christianity not 

 Mysterious, who in England first paid Bruno some- 

 thing of the respect he deserved. His championship 

 was not, perhaps, of the most discerning or of the most 

 valuable, but it was honest. A copy of the Spaccio had 

 come into his possession, one which he believed to be 

 the only one then in existence, and as a result of his 

 reading he claimed Bruno as the founder of free thought. 

 He had studied the sayings on Divine Magic in that 

 work, and had fastened on the fact that Bruno "re- 

 garded magic as nothing but a more recondite, non- 

 vulgar, although perfectly natural wisdom." This was 

 certainly true ; but Toiand added, "So he sometimes 

 calls the eternal vicissitude of material forms Trans- 

 migration," which was at least misleading. Among 

 his manuscripts Toiand left " an account of Giordano 

 Bruno's Book of the Universe " (De rinfinito\ along 

 with a translation of the introductory epistle. 2 And 

 somewhat earlier, in 1713, a translation of the Spaccio 

 was made into English by W. Morehead, 3 who may 

 have been one of Toland's brethren, as the Quarterly 

 Reviewer suggests. Toiand himself was, however, 



1 Janius Junius Toiand (1669-1722) j v. Leslie Stephen's English Thought, etc., 

 vol. i. ch. 3. 



2 Vide Collection of several pieces of Mr. John Toiand, ivith some memoirs of his life 

 and writings, London (1726), vol. i. 



3 According to the British Museum Catalogue. No name is on the title page of the 

 work " Spaccio, etc., or the Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast." To the chequered 



