[Footnote 104:  Mere correspondence with heretics exposed an Italian to the Inquisition.  Residence in heretical lands, except with episcopal license, was forbidden.  The rules of the Index proscribed books in which the name of a heretic was cited with approval.]

[Footnote 105:  Bruno speaks himself of ‘arte della memoria et inventiva’ (op. cit. p. 339).  Ciotto mentions ‘la memoria et altre scientie’ (ib. p. 334).]

[Footnote 106:  Op. cit. p. 335.]

Another weakness in his character was extraordinary want of caution.  Having lived about the world so long, and changed from town to town, supporting himself as he best could, he had acquired the custom of attracting notice by startling paradoxes.  Nor does he seem to have cared to whom he made the dangerous confidence of his esoteric beliefs.  His public writings, presumably composed with a certain circumspection—­since everybody knows the proverb litera scripta manet—­contain such perilous stuff that—­when we consider what their author may have let fall in unguarded conversation—­we are prepared to credit the charges brought against him by Mocenigo.  For it must now be said that this man, ’induced by the obligation of his conscience and by order of his confessor,’ denounced Bruno to the Inquisition on May 23, 1592.

When the two men, so entirely opposite in their natures, first came together, Bruno began to instruct his patron in the famous art of memory and mathematics.  At the same time he discoursed freely and copiously, according to his wont, upon his own philosophy.  Mocenigo took no interest in metaphysics, and was terrified by the audacity of Bruno’s speculations.  It enraged him to find how meager was Bruno’s vaunted method for acquiring and retaining knowledge without pains.  In his secret heart he believed that the teacher whom he had maintained at a considerable cost, was withholding the occult knowledge he so much coveted.  Bruno, meanwhile, attended Andrea Morosini’s receptions in the palace at S. Luca, and frequented those of Bernardo Secchini at the sign of the Golden Ship in the Merceria.  He made friends with scholars and men of fashion; absented himself for weeks together at Padua; showed that he was tired of Mocenigo; and ended by rousing that man’s suspicious jealousy.  Mocenigo felt that he had been deceived by an impostor, who, instead of furnishing the wares for which he bargained, put him off with declamations on the nature of the universe.  What was even more terrible, he became convinced that this charlatan was an obstinate heretic.