Mrs. RUSSELL BARRINGTON, Melbury Hon. Mrs. EDWARD TALBOT, The Vicar

GIORDANO BRUNO AND NEW ITALY.

No greater contrast could be imagined, no stronger proof could have been given of the triumphant march of progress in the face of a power which prides itself on remaining 'ever the same,' than by the grand celebration held at Rome on that Field of Flowers where one of the deepest thinkers of all ages was burnt in 1600, in consequence of a sentence of the Inquisition. Of late years Italy has raised statues to several illustrious religious and political reformers who perished at the stake, such as Arnold of Brescia and Savonarola. To Giordano Bruno himself a monument was erected at Naples as long as twenty-four years ago-that is, soon after Garibaldi had freed the Two Sicilies from Bourbon tyranny and thus virtually founded Italian unity. Twenty years ago it would still have been impossible thus to vindicate Bruno's memory in the natural capital of the country, where the Martyr of Freethought, clad in the yellow robe of heretics, painted with pincer-bearing devils and flames, nobly died on the faggots without uttering even a cry of the fierce pain his burning flesh felt.

Twenty years ago the Papacy still held political sway at Rome. In the present instance one might have thought the occupant of the Vatican would refrain from showing too plainly what the restoration of States of the Church' would mean in regard to religious toleration and the rights of human intellect. But no; instead of preserving a judicious silence on the barbarous immolation of Giordano Bruno, Leo the Thirteenth actually broke out, before his Consistory, into a long speech containing a protest both against the conversion of Rome into a capital of Italy, and against 'the impiety, the enormous outrage and insolent ostentation' of those who honour a man that has abjured the Catholic name.' Leo the Thirteenth declares his own freedom of action to be taken away from him as supreme pontiff by such a commemoration. In order to recover the liberty necessary for the exercise of his apostolic office, he claims the re-establishment of his political principality. From the pursuance of this aim,' he says, 'neither the iniquity of the times nor any difficulty, however great, shall deter us.'

It was Louis Veuillot, the French ultramontane spokesman, who in our days, under the rule of Napoleon the Third, wrote in regard to

Huss and Luther, that the only thing to be regretted was that 'Huss met with his deserts so late, and that Luther was not burnt at all.' Within our memory, a German Catholic writer had said before Veuillot that the secular and spiritual authorities in Italy would have trodden all human and divine rights under foot, had they not applied the extreme severity of the law to Bruno.' During the recent celebration at Rome, it was stated in the Riforma that 'the P. Balan who to-day occupies a high office in the Vatican Library, has declared that, after all, it was not worth while to bewail Bruno so much, considering that he was a heretic

In presence of the Pope's strange manifesto, the organ of the Italian Premier says:

In truth, this punishment of Bruno-which, to judge things mildly, we might have set down as the result of the cruel practices of a past age-thus falls back upon the Vatican as an immutable principle of its religion and government: a principle which would still be enforced if the Vatican had the power. The Church, then, has not changed in any way. . . . Now, none of her most decided adversaries would have gone so far in his charges against her. All would rather have preferred figuring to themselves that she had given up errors which once were common to a backward civilisation, and which the progress of time has left behind for ever. Instead of this, the Church has passed a worse judgment upon herself than her bitterest antagonists could have done.

It is certainly a sorry spectacle to find that at the end of this nineteenth century there should still be a group of men who believe their freedom of action to be interfered with by the honour done to the name of a martyr, whose living body was consumed in the flames. because he advocated the Copernican system of astronomy and held speculative views not consistent with Papal dogmas. On this subject, Italian Liberals, the most moderate as well as the most advanced, have within the last few weeks uttered sentiments of which but a faint echo has penetrated to England. Yet here in England it was that Bruno, the greatest philosopher of the Renaissance, became acquainted with men eminent in the republic of letters as well as with persons of the highest social and political rank, including England's famed queen. Here, in London, it was-as we now know from the protocols of the Inquisition, which have been made accessible but in recent years that even most of those of his books which bear the name of Venice, Paris, and other towns on the title-page were printed; the English publisher, as Bruno averred, having insisted on the change for the sake of effecting a larger sale. Again, as we now also know from a protocol in the Venetian State archives, it was most especially on account of the arch-heresy of his 'having lauded Queen Elizabeth and other heretic princes in his books,' that Bruno was dragged before the Holy Office. This charge was put in the forefront of his alleged crimes by the P. Inquisitor. Other serious charges against

1 'Giordano Bruno da Nola, imputato non solo di heretico, ma anco di heresiarca, havendo composto diversi libri, nei quali, laudando assai la Regina di

him were, that he believed in the existence of countless worlds, and that he had also taught that this globe of ours had somehow existed from eternity.

Leo the Thirteenth, in the spirit of the old Rome of the Popes, still takes it as an offence that the remembrance of the suffering seeker after truth should be glorified. Italian Liberals, who are often twitted by Roman clericalists with having diminished the importance of the Eternal City by making it the capital of a special country, proudly answer that after the Rome of the Republic, after the Rome of the Caesars, after the Rome of the Popes, the great city still speaks out with a grand voice: this time as the mouthpiece of freedom of thought. On the ruins of the past-they say-a New Catholicity, a third or fourth Rome, has risen, which now possesses an international importance as symbolising the cause of Human Right, the triumph of Intellect. Hence it was but to be expected that men of many lands, who stand in the vanguard of the struggle against Obscurantism, should join, as they have done, in honouring the valiant victim of a revengeful priestcraft. Nor is it held to be without significance that Sig. Crispi, the present Premier, once a fellow-worker of Mazzini and Garibaldi, has been among the earliest. promoters of the monument, and that the unveiling of the statue of Bruno was combined with a commemoration in honour of Garibaldi, than whom there has been no more resolute adversary of the hierarchical system. In this way, New Italy-as was said at the banquet presided over by the German scientist and Italian senator, Moleschott has assigned to Rome her proper spiritual place in the civilised world.

II.

Geneva, France, England, Germany, in which countries the martyred champion of freethought alternately dwelt during his restless pilgrimage, are all, like Italy herself, particularly interested in him whose ashes were thrown into the Tiber, but whose works, though put on the Index, remain immortal. Towards the end of the last century he had been wellnigh forgotten. His books had become publishers' rarities. The best present Italian writers 2 avow that German research saved him from oblivion, and that Germans have devoted the most careful study to Bruno. F. H. Jacobi, Herder, Lessing, Schelling, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Wagner, and Gfrörer-who re-edited his Italian and Latin works 3-Feuerbach, Lange, Dühring, Zöllner, Hellwald, Carrière, the German-Swiss Brunnhofer, and many Inghilterra et altri principi heretici, scriveva alcune cose concernenti il particolar della religione, che non convenivano, seben egli parlava filosoficamente.'

2 See Domenico Berti: Vita di Giordano Bruno. David Levi: Giordano Bruno o la Religione del Pensiero.

See Wagner: Opere di Giordano Bruno; Gfrörer: Corpus Philosophorum; Fiorento: Jordani Bruni Opera Latine Conscripta.

also

others, have done good work in this connection. Nor shall Röth, our university professor at Heidelberg, be forgotten, who was to us both a friend and a teacher in the days of our youth, and whose premature death has unfortunately cut short the powerful promise of still more important writings than he actually left.

We can rapidly pass over the incidents of Bruno's troubled life. On the moot question as to whether he had ever joined a Reformed community, recent investigation has brought the fact to light that his name, at least, was inscribed in the list of the members of the Italian Protestant Church at Geneva. When in that stronghold of the Reformation, he doffed his Dominican dress, owing to advice given to him, and was fitted out, by his compatriots there, with knightly sword, bat, mantle, and shoes. The dark Calvinistic creed had, however, as little attraction for him as the orthodoxy of Oxford. In his tremendous quarrel with the doctors of theology of that university town he prided himself, in opposition to their ignorance, presumption, and rustic rudeness,' on having proved by word and deed that he himself had been born under a more genial sky.' Still, in the vehement expressions launched against them afterwards, he showed clearly enough that he could match Luther in the vituperative strength of language.

He wanted to be--so he said in his announcement to the University of Oxford—'an awakener of sleeping minds, a subduer of arrogant stupidity, a champion of the universal love of mankind.' To him, in his own words, 'Italian and Englishman were the same: man or woman, bishop or king, burgher or soldier, made no difference; he only looked at the face of true humanity.' The manifesto is written in somewhat bombastic style; but that was the manner of the age. His sad experience at Oxford did not prevent him from retaining a kindly remembrance of England. Of Queen Elizabeth, who, being herself excommunicated by the Pope, gave protection to the persecuted philosopher, he repeatedly speaks with most glowing gratitude. Like all foreign travellers from early times, he was struck with the beauty and the bearing of Englishwomen. He says 'they are on earth what the stars are above.' In one of his poems— in which, it is true, he laments, in the tone of Rousseau or Schiller, the destruction of a more beautiful primitive world by the spread at an aggressive and pitiless so-called civilisation-he sings of the Briton's terrible energy, who, regardless of the stormy deep and of the towering mountains, goes down to the sea in ships mightily exceeding Argonautic art.'

In Germany, where Bruno for two years taught philosophy and mathematics at the then famous university of Wittenberg, and where he also made shorter stays at Marburg, Prag, Helmstädt, and Frankfurt, he seems to have pleased himself best. Witness his fare4 T. Dufour: Giordano Bruno à Genève. 1884.

Vol. XXVI.—No. 149.

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