At that time—­somewhere about 1580—­Shakespeare was still serving his apprenticeship as playwright, and had perhaps less claim on the notice of the observant foreigner than his elder contemporaries.  London was still a small town, where the news of the day spread rapidly, and where, no doubt, strangers were as eagerly discussed as they are now within narrow town limits.  Bruno’s daring speculations could not remain the exclusive property of his own coterie.  And as Shakespeare had the faculty of absorbing all new ideas afloat in the air, he would hardly have escaped the influence of the teacher who proclaimed in proud self-confidence that he was come to arouse men out of their theological stagnation.  His influence on Bacon is more evident, because of their friendly associations.  Bruno lectured at Oxford, but the English university found less favor in his eyes than English court life.  Pedantry had indeed set its fatal mark on scholarship, not only on the Continent but in England.  Aristotle was still the god of the pedants of that age, and dissent from his teaching was heavily punished, for the dry dust of learning blinded the eyes of the scholastics to new truths.

Bruno, the knight-errant of these truths, devoted all his life to scourging pedantry, and dissented in toto from the idol of the schools.  No wonder he and Oxford did not agree together.  He wittily calls her “the widow of sound learning,” and again, “a constellation of pedantic, obstinate ignorance and presumption, mixed with a clownish incivility that would tax the patience of Job.”  He lashed the shortcomings of English learning in ‘La Cena delle Ceneri’ (Ash Wednesday Conversation).  But Bruno’s roving spirit, and perhaps also his heterodox tendencies, drove him at last from England, and for the next five years he roamed about Germany, leading the life of the wandering scholars of the time, always involved in conflicts and controversies with the authorities, always antagonistic to public opinion.  Flying in the face of the most cherished traditions, he underwent the common experience of all prophets:  the minds he was bent on awakening refused to be aroused.

Finally he was invited by Zuone Mocenigo of Venice to teach him the higher and secret learning.  The Venetian supposed that Bruno, with more than human erudition, possessed the art of conveying knowledge into the heads of dullards.  Disappointed in this expectation, he quarreled with his teacher, and in a spirit of revenge picked out of Bruno’s writings a mass of testimony sufficient to convict him of heresy.  This he turned over to the Inquisitor at Venice, Bruno was arrested, convicted, and sent to the Inquisition in Rome.  When called upon there to recant, he replied, “I ought not to recant, and I will not recant.”  He was accordingly confined in prison for seven years, then sentenced to death.  On hearing the warrant he said, “It may be that you fear more to deliver this judgment than I to bear