[Footnote 98:  It is a curious fact that the single copy of Campanella’s poems on which Orelli based his edition of 1834, came from Wolfenbuettel.]

[Footnote 99:  They were published at Frankfort, and dedicated to the friendly Prince of Wolfenbuettel.]

At Helmstaedt he came into collision with Boetius, the rector of the Evangelical church, who issued a sentence of excommunication against him.  Like a new Odysseus, he set forth once again upon his voyage, and in the spring of 1590 anchored in Frankfort on the Main.  A convent (that of the Carmelites) sheltered him in this city, where he lived on terms of intimacy with the printers Wechel and Fischer, and other men of learning.  It would appear from evidence laid before the Venetian Inquisitors that the prior of the monastery judged him to be a man of genius and doctrine, devoid of definite religion, addicted to fantastic studies, and bent on the elaboration of a philosophy that should supersede existing creeds.[100] This was a not inaccurate portrait of Bruno as he then appeared to conservatives of commonplace capacity.  Yet nothing occurred to irritate him in the shape of persecution or disturbance.  Bruno worked in quiet at Frankfort, pouring forth thousands of metaphysical verses, some at least of which were committed to the press in three volumes published by the Wechels.

[Footnote 100:  Britanno’s Deposition, Berti’s Vita di G.B. p. 337.]

Between Frankfort and Italy literary communications were kept open through the medium of the great fair, which took place every year at Michaelmas.[101] Books formed one of the principal commodities, and the Italian bibliopoles traveled across the Alps to transact business on these important occasions.  It happened by such means that a work of Bruno’s, perhaps the De Monude, found its way to Venice.[102] Exposed on the counter of Giambattista Ciotto, then plying the trade of bookseller in that city, this treatise met the eyes of a Venetian gentleman called Giovanni Mocenigo.  He belonged to one of the most illustrious of the still surviving noble families in Venice.  The long line of their palaces upon the Grand Canal has impressed the mind of every tourist.  One of these houses, it may be remarked, was occupied by Lord Byron, who, had he known of Bruno’s connection with the Mocenighi, would undoubtedly have given to the world a poem or a drama on the fate of our philosopher.  Giovanni Mocenigo was a man verging on middle life, superstitious, acknowledging the dominion of his priest, but alive in a furtive way to perilous ideas.  Morally, he stands before us as a twofold traitor:  a traitor to his Church, so long as he hoped to gain illicit power by magic arts; a traitor to his guest, so soon as he discovered that his soul’s risk brought himself no profit.[103] He seems to have imagined that Bruno might teach him occult science or direct him on a royal way to knowledge without strenuous study.  Subsequent events proved that, though