At no time could the book have hoped for many readers.  Least of all would it have found them among the Italians of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, to whom its energetic language and unfamiliar conceptions would have presented insuperable difficulties.  Between Dante and Alfieri no Italian poet except Michael Angelo expressed so much deep thought and feeling in phrases so terse, and with originality of style so daring; and even Michael Angelo is monotonous in the range of his ideas and uniform in his diction, when compared with the indescribable violence and vigour of Campanella.  Campanella borrows little by way of simile or illustration from the outer world, and he never falls into the commonplaces of poetic phraseology.  His poems exhibit the exact opposite of the Petrarchistic or the Marinistic mannerism.  Each sonnet seems to have been wrenched alive and palpitating from the poet’s heart.  There is no smoothness, no gradual unfolding of a theme, no rhetorical exposition, no fanciful embroidery, no sweetness of melodic cadence, in his masculine art of poetry.  Brusque, rough, violent in transition, leaping from the sublime to the ridiculous—­his poems owe their elevation to the intensity of their feeling, the nobleness and condensation of their thought, the energy and audacity of their expression, their brevity, sincerity, and weight of sentiment.  Campanella had an essentially combative intellect.  He was both a poet and a philosopher militant.  He stood alone, making war upon the authority of Aristotle in science, of Machiavelli in state-craft, and of Petrarch in art, taking the fortresses of phrase by storm, and subduing the hardest material of philosophy to the tyranny of his rhymes.  Plebeian saws, salient images, dry sentences of metaphysical speculation, logical summaries, and fiery tirades are hurled together—­ half crude and cindery scoriae, half molten metal and resplendent ore—­ from the volcano of his passionate mind.  Such being the nature of Campanella’s style, when in addition it is remembered that his text is sometimes hopelessly corrupt and his allusions obscure, the difficulties offered by his sonnets to the translator will be readily conceived.

IV.

At the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth centuries, philosophy took a new point of departure among the Italians, and all the fundamental ideas which have since formed the staple of modern European systems were anticipated by a few obscure thinkers.  It is noticeable that the States of Naples, hitherto comparatively inert in the intellectual development of Italy, furnished the five writers who preceded Bacon, Leibnitz, Schelling, and Comte.  Telesio of Cosenza, Bruno of Nola, Campanella of Stilo, Vanini and Vico of Naples are the chief among these novi homines or pioneers of modern thought.  The characteristic point of this new philosophy was an unconditional return to Nature as the source of