and the ignoble a stranger.  The awakener of sleeping souls.  The trampler upon presuming and recalcitrant ignorance.  Who in all his acts proclaims a universal benevolence toward man.  Who loveth not Italian more than Briton, male than female, mitred than crowned head, gowned than armed, frocked than frockless; but seeketh after him whose conversation is the more peaceful, more civil, more loyal, and more profitable.’  This manifesto, in the style of a mountebank, must have sounded like a trumpet-blast to set the humdrum English doctors with sleepy brains and moldy science on their guard against a man whom they naturally regarded as an Italian charlatan.  What, indeed, was this more highly-wrought theology, this purer wisdom?  What call had this self-panegyrist to stir souls from comfortable slumbers?  What right had he to style the knowledge of his brethren ignorance?  Probably he was but some pestilent fellow, preaching unsound doctrine on the Trinity, like Peter Martyr Vermigli, who had been properly hissed out of Oxford a quarter of a century earlier.  When Bruno arrived and lectured, their worst prognostications were fulfilled.  Did he not maintain a theory of the universe which even that perilous speculator and political schemer, Francis Bacon, sneered at as nugatory?

[Footnote 95:  Printed in the Explicatio triginta Sigillarum.]

In spite of academical opposition, Bruno enjoyed fair weather, halcyon months, in England.  His description of the Ash Wednesday Supper at Fulke Greville’s, shows that a niche had been carved out for him in London, where he occupied a pedestal of some importance.  Those gentlemen of Elizabeth’s Court did not certainly exaggerate the value of their Italian guest.  In Italy, most of them had met with spirits of Bruno’s stamp, whom they had not time or opportunity to prove.  He was one among a hundred interesting foreigners; and his martyrdom had not as yet set the crown of glory or of shame upon his forehead.  They probably accepted him as London society of the present day accepts a theosophist from Simla or Thibet.  But his real home at this epoch, the only home, so far as I can see, that Bruno ever had, after he left his mother at the age of thirteen for a convent, was the house of Castelnau.  The truest chords in the Italian’s voice vibrate when he speaks of that sound Frenchman.  To Mme. de Castelnau he alludes with respectful sincerity, paying her the moderate and well-weighed homage which, for a noble woman, is the finest praise.  There is no rhetoric in the words he uses to express his sense of obligation to her kindness.  They are delicate, inspired with a tact which makes us trust the writer’s sense of fitness.[96] But Bruno indulges in softer phrases, drawn from the heart, and eminently characteristic of his predominant enthusiastic mood, when he comes to talk of the little girl, Marie, who brightened the home of the Castelnaus.  ’What shall I say of their noble-natured daughter?  She has