Art. VI.-GIORDANO BRUNO IN ENGLAND.

1. Spaccio della Bestia Trionfante, or The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast. Translated from the Italian of

Jordano Bruno Nolano. London, 1713.

2. Le opere italiane di Giordano Bruno. Ristampate da Paolo de Lagarde. Göttingen, 1888.

3. Life of Giordano Bruno the Nolan. By I. Frith. Revised by Prof. Moriz Carriere. London: Trübner, 1887. 4. Le opere latine di Giordano Bruno esposte e confrontate con le italiane, da Felice Tocco. Firenze, 1889.

5. Giordano Bruno und Shakespeare. Von Dr Robert Beyersdorff. Oldenburg, 1889.

6. The Poems and Masque of Thomas Carew. Edited by J. W. Ebsworth. London: Reeves and Turner, 1893. 7. The Italian Renaissance in England. By Lewis Einstein. New York: Macmillan Company, 1902.

'THE prophetic soul of the wide world dreaming on things to come-these words, in Shakespeare's occultest sonnet, have been read sometimes as a stray from the theories of Giordano Bruno. At least they might serve to denote Bruno himself, with his poetical presentiment of modern pantheism and of a modern ethical temper. One of the divining and expressive minds of the Renaissance, full of its clashing elements of ideal aspiration and animal will, he remains, with his vision on distant things, rather solitary in its midst. The Italian books, which are his main bequest, were written, and probably printed, in England. But much as Bruno has been studied, especially since his monument rose on the place of his burning in Rome, the chapter of his visit to England and his dealings with the English world of his own day claim fresh attention, as well as the strange silence of our own records concerning him, the possible traces of his presence in Spenser and Shakespeare, and the fitful appearances of his name or influence in our literature during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

Bruno was in England about two years and a half, like a man waiting in harbour amidst a series of violent voyages, enjoying a peace which to him could only be comparative. He came, not more than thirty-five years

old, with a passionate intellectual experience already behind him. In the shade of the Dominican life at Naples he had read freely, and the irritant, original quality of his thought had soon brought adventures. He had clashed with the Church, had been threatened, and had put off the religious habit and fled. Thus he started on his long unquiet pilgrimage as a propagandist, joining the assailants of Aristotle and those of the old astronomy, and adding theological heresies of his own. He could not rest in the city of Calvin, which would only harbour a convert, though, luckily for Bruno, Calvin was dead. Then he lectured boldly in Toulouse, one of the homes of the Inquisition, and next, to the credit of Henry III, found shelter and a reader's rostrum in Paris. Here he spoke and wrote much, in the sense of the neoPlatonists, on the 'Shadows of Ideas,' or the deceiving shows of sense. These, to him, were faint copies of the eternal realities or Ideas, which in turn emanated from the supreme Idea of all. In the spring, probably, of 1583, he quitted Paris 'because of the disturbances,' bringing letters from Henry to his ambassador in London.

Michel de Castelnau de Mauvissière, a diplomatist of honour and address, had held his post, and the favour of Elizabeth, for nine years, despite his devotion to Mary Stuart. His memoirs, written in London, but ending with the year 1570, show glimpses of philosophic thought which have been held to recall that of Bruno. He was indeed an appointed guardian for such a visitor. Old cuts are to be seen of the low-hung and narrowwindowed mansion in Butcher Row, leading from Wych Street to the Strand, with the fleur-de-lis on its outer walls, and then or later called Beaumont House. The region is now cleared to purge the thoroughfares of London. Here probably were written four or five of the most explosive books of the sixteenth century. Bruno lived as the 'ambassador's gentleman,' under the roof of a staunch Roman Catholic, and safe by privilege from the arm of any Church. His inconvenient estate as an unfrocked priest was made easy by a special exemption from mass. During his whole stay he 'did not go to mass when it was said indoors, or out of doors, nor yet to any

sermon.'

Bruno lived on close and happy terms with his host,

who 'welcomed him with such largesse to a notable position in his household,' and who earns all the more credit if he can scarcely have known that he entertained the chief thinker that had come to England since Erasmus. For Bruno such generosity 'turned England into Italy, and London into Nola.' One of his recondite works, called the 'Exposition of the Thirty Seals-which is not a commentary on the Apocalypse-Bruno seems to have had printed in London soon after his arrival, and to have prefaced with a dedication to Castelnau by way of grateful afterthought. To the same protector he inscribed three of his far more notable Italian books written in London, using terms of a passionate gratitude which rings true through the pile of superlatives. Hatred and calumny are the lot of ruthless reforming philosophers; and Bruno abounds with plaints against the ignorant tale-bearers and caitiffs who assailed him. From all such Castelnau, who heaped one good office on another, was his only rock of defence. Elsewhere Bruno sounds the note of that superlative pride which saves his excessive arrogance from our ridicule and carried his unpacified spirit through to martyrdom. He caught the higher style of that age in his words to the ambassador :—

'In having near you one who is truly worthy of your protection and aid you show yourself, as ever, conformable to princes great of soul, and to the gods and heroes who have appointed you and those like you to be guardians of their friends. . . . For while your betters in fortune can do nothing for you, who exceed them in virtue, you can do for others something which shall straightway be written in the book of eternity, whether that which is seen upon earth or that which is supposed in heaven.'

Another passage begins by loading the female sex, in Bruno's way, with thirty-nine distinct epithets of abuse, the lightest of which are 'frailty' and 'imperfection,' and which are also quaintly contrived to fit his other aversion, the 'first matter' of Aristotle; but he ends, by way of exception, with a compliment-so sudden and vehement are the turns of his tongue!-to the wife and child of Castelnau. His hostess is endowed, he says carefully, with 'no mediocre bodily beauty,' and with courtesy and discretion. Maria, though only six, might, for her speech,

be either Italian, French, or English, and can so 'handle musical instruments that you cannot tell if she is of bodily or incorporeal substance'; while her 'ripe and goodly bearing makes a doubt whether she has come down from heaven or is merely born of earth.' This tone is in the English as well as the Italian taste of the time, and might remind us of some passionate praise of a child in a play of Shakespeare, or of Fletcher afterwards.

Soon after his arrival, Bruno made what seems to have been his one excursion to an English seat of learning. Before the 'Thirty Seals' he had set, not only his dedication, but a Latin letter, conceived in the phrase, an enemy might say, of a cheap-jack, and addressed to the University of Oxford. Its excess of self-praise and reviling is a pitch even above Bruno's ordinary shout of exaltation or disdain. He has not a quiet style. The dust of his advance and the flaming and creaking of the axles of his chariot are something incredible. He accumulates epithet and synonym as though something were to be gained by them, until we hardly know what he is saying. At his best he is variously noble, sometimes full and ample, after the bent of Rabelais, turning his thought over and over, as though loath to let it fall till we have seen its last facet, while at moments he is inspired by Plato, and recalls him. His own ideal of writing he discloses in a sentence: Let me not deal in petty, delicate, curt, cramped, and concise epigram, but in a broad and affluent vein of prose, which is large and long, firm and flowing.' But at other times he writes thus :

'To the most excellent Vice-Chancellor of the Academy of Oxford; to its illustrious Doctors and famous Masters; greeting from Philotheus J(ordanus) B(runus) of Nola, doctor of a more careful divinity, professor of a purer and harmless wisdom; known in the chief academies of Europe; a philosopher approved and honorifically welcomed; a stranger only amongst churls and savages; the awakener of nodding spirits, the queller of insolent and kicking ignorance, in all his actions betokening a general love of mankind; affecting Briton as much as Italian, woman as much as man, and alike the wearer of crown and mitre, and of gown and sword, the cowled and the uncowled; but most affecting him whose converse is peaceful, humane, loyal, and profitable, who looks not to the anointed head, the crossed forehead, the washen hands, and

the circumcision, but to the spirit and the cultivation of the wit, whenever he is suffered to look on the face of a true man; hated by spreaders of folly and petty humbugs (hypocritunculi), but loved by men of proof and zeal and applauded by the nobler spirits. All greeting to the illustrious and excellent Vice-Chancellor, and to the chief men of his University.'

After all, this was true in substance; and Bruno was only carrying somewhat far the principle of Flaubert's high counsel, 'Soyons plus fiers!' He goes on, however, to advertise his philosophic wares with a sort of ferocious politeness, which is always breaking down, and intimates his readiness to dispute with any one whom he can answer without disgracing himself.

Bruno thus invited himself to lecture at Oxford and argue against all worthy opponents. Naturally no reply of the Vice-Chancellor, Thornton, is on record. There is no trace of any permit being granted, nor is Bruno named among the foreigners who were incorporated in the University. This silence of all the English chronicles contrasts with the loud volubility of his own. Fond as he was, both in dialogue and farce, of pillorying pomposity, he might himself have posed as another stock personage of contemporary farce. The Miles Gloriosus' of the antichurch-militant seems to cry aloud in every allusion that he makes to his Oxford visit. By some means he got his wish. He had already made acquaintance with Philip Sidney, and probably of Fulke Greville, Lord Brook, who fill so large a place in his later accounts of his English visit. Perhaps it was from them that he took introductions to their own House, Christ Church, of whose Dean, the elder Sir Toby Matthew, as well as of Dr Martin Culpeper, Warden of New College, he speaks with enthusiasm as exceptions to the ruck of Oxford doctors. In any case he says that he lectured; and he chose the two subjects which then filled his mind and were certain to exasperate discussion. He attacked Aristotle's view of the immortality of the soul, and also, in discourses 'De Quintuplici Sphæra,' the still received astronomy. It was probably on the first of these themes that he spoke on the public occasion which is also recorded, though still without any mention of Bruno's name, by Anthony à Wood. So Nietzsche, three centuries later, might have left little impression after haranguing a company of Oxford dons. Voi. 196.-No. 392.

2 L