big fellows shouldering through the crowd were treacherous or ready with their knives.  The servants of great houses seemed to Bruno discourteous and savage; yet he says nothing about such subtlety and vice as rendered the retainers of Italian nobles perilous to order.  He paints the broad portrait of a muscular and insolently insular people, untainted by the evils of corrupt civilization.  Mounting higher in the social scale, Bruno renders deserved homage to the graceful and unaffected manners of young English noblemen, from whom he singles Sidney out as the star of cultivated chivalry.[89]

[Footnote 88:  The ‘Cena delle Ceneri,’ Op.  It. vol. i. pp. 137-151].

[Footnote 89:  Signor Berti conjectures that Bruno may have met Sidney first at Milan.  But Bruno informs us that he did not become acquainted with him till he came to London:  ‘Tra’ quali e tanto conosciuto, per fama prima quanbo eravamo in Milano et in Francia, e poi per experienza or che siamo ne la sua patria’ (Op.  It. vol. i. p. 145).]

What he says about the well-born youth of England, shows that the flower of our gentlefolk delighted Southern observers by their mixture of simplicity and sweetness with good breeding and sound sense.  For the ladies of England he cannot find words fair enough to extol the beauties of their persons and the purity of their affections.  Elizabeth herself he calls a goddess, diva, using phrases which were afterwards recited in the terms of his indictment before the Inquisition.  What pleased him most in England, was the liberty of speech and thought he there enjoyed.[90] Society was so urbane, government was so unsuspicious, that a man could venture to call things by their proper names and speak his heart out without reserve.  That Bruno’s panegyric was not prompted by any wish to flatter national vanity, is proved by the hard truths he spoke about the grossness of the people, and by his sarcasms on Oxford pedants.  He also ventured to condemn in no unmeasured terms some customs which surprised him in domestic intercourse.  He drew, for instance, a really gruesome picture of the loving-cup, as it passed round the table, tasted by a mixed assemblage.[91]

A visit paid by Bruno to Oxford forms a curious episode in his English experiences.  He found that university possessed by pedants and ignorant professors of the old learning.  ‘Men of choice,’ he calls them, ’trailing their long velvet gowns, this one arrayed with two bright chains of gold around his neck, that one, good heavens! with such a valuable hand—­twelve rings upon two fingers, giving him the look of some rich jeweler.’[92] These excellent dons, blest in the possession of fat fellowships, felt no sympathy for an eccentric interloper of Bruno’s stamp.  They allowed him to lecture on the Soul and the Sphere.

[Footnote 90:  Preface to ‘Lo Spaccio della Bestia’ (Op.  It. vol. ii. p. 108).]

[Footnote 91:  Op.  It. vol. i. p. 150.]