Bruno had just passed his thirtieth year.  He was a man of middling height, spare figure, and olive complexion, wearing a short chestnut-colored beard.  He spoke with vivacity and copious rhetoric, aiming rather at force than at purity of diction, indulging in trenchant metaphors to adumbrate recondite thoughts, passing from grotesque images to impassioned flights of declamation, blending acute arguments and pungent satires with grave mystical discourses.  The impression of originality produced by his familiar conversation rendered him agreeable to princes.  There was nothing of the pedant in his nature, nothing about him of the doctor but his title.

After a residence of rather less than four years in Paris, he resolved upon a journey to England.  Henri supplied him with letters of introduction to the French ambassador in London, Michel de Castelnau de la Mauvissiere.  This excellent man, who was then attempting to negotiate the marriage of Elizabeth with the Duke of Anjou, received Bruno into his own family as one of the gentlemen of his suite.  Under his roof the wandering scholar enjoyed a quiet home during the two years which he passed in England—­years that were undoubtedly the happiest, as they were the most industrious, of his checkered life.  It is somewhat strange that Bruno left no trace of his English visit in contemporary literature.  Seven of his most important works were printed in London, though they bore the impress of Paris and Venice—­for the very characteristic reason that English people only cared for foreign publications.  Four of these, on purely metaphysical topics, were dedicated to Michel de Castelnau; two, treating of moral and psychological questions, the famous Spaccio della Bestia and Gli eroici Furori, were inscribed to Sidney.  The Cena delle Ceneri describes a supper party at the house of Fulke Greville; and it is clear from numerous allusions scattered up and down these writings, that their author was admitted on terms of familiarity to the best English society.  Yet no one mentions him.  Fulke Greville in his Life of Sidney passes him by in silence; nor am I aware that any one of Sidney’s panegyrists, the name of whom is legion, alludes to the homage paid him by the Italian philosopher.

On his side, Bruno has bequeathed to us animated pictures of his life in London, portraying the English of that period as they impressed a sensitive Italian.[88] His descriptions are valuable, since they dwell on slight particulars unnoticed by ambassadors in their dispatches.  He was much struck with the filth and unkempt desolation of the streets adjacent to the Thames, the rudeness of the watermen who plied their craft upon the river, and the stalwart beef-eating brutality of prentices and porters.  The population of London displayed its antipathy to foreigners by loud remarks, hustled them in narrow lanes, and played at rough-and-tumble with them after the manners of a bear-garden.  But there is no hint that these