the fact of his condemnation and execution.  Rome was crowded in the jubilee year of 1600.  Bruno was burned in open daylight on the Campo di Fiora.  Yet the only eye-witness who records the event, is Gaspar Schoppe, or Scioppius, who wrote a letter on the subject to his friend Rittershausen.  Kepler, eight years afterwards, informed his correspondent Breugger that Bruno had been really burned:  ’he bore his agonizing death with fortitude, abiding by the asseveration that all religions are vain, and that God identifies himself with the world, circumference and center.’  Kepler, it may be observed, conceived a high opinion of Bruno’s speculations, and pointed him out to Galileo as the man who had divined the infinity of solar systems in their correlation to one infinite order of the universe.[117]

[Footnote 117:  Doubts have recently been raised as to whether Bruno was really burned.  But these are finally disposed of by a succinct and convincing exposition of the evidence by Mr. R.C.  Christie, in Macmillan’s Magazine, October 1885.  In addition to Schoppe and Kepler, we have the reference to Bruno’s burning published by Mersenne in 1624; but what is far more important, the Avviso di Roma for February 19,1600, records this event as having occurred upon the preceding Thursday.  To Signor Berti’s two works, Documenti intorno a G. Bruno (Roma, 1880), and Copernico e le vicende, etc. (Roma, 1876), we owe most of the material which has been lucidly sifted by Mr. R.C.  Christie.]

Scioppius was a German humanist of the elder Italianated type, an elegant Latin stylist, who commented indifferently on the Priapeia and the Stoic philosophy.  He abjured Protestantism, and like Muretus, sold his pen to Rome.  The Jesuits, in his pompous panegyric, were first saluted as ‘the praetorian cohort of the camp of God.’  Afterwards, when he quarreled with their Order, he showered invectives on them in the manner of a Poggio or Filelfo.  The literary infamies of the fifteenth century reappeared in his polemical attacks on Protestants, and in his satires upon Scaliger.  Yet he was a man of versatile talents and considerable erudition.  It must be mentioned in his honor that he visited Campanella in his prison, and exerted himself for his liberation.  Campanella dedicated his Atheismus Triumphatus to Scioppius, calling him ‘the dawn-star of our age.’  Schoppe was also the first credible authority to warn Sarpi of the imminent peril he ran from Roman hired assassins, as I hope to relate in my chapter upon Sarpi’s life.  This man’s letter to his friend is the single trustworthy document which we possess regarding the last hours of Bruno.  Its inaccuracies on minor points may be held to corroborate his testimony.

Scioppius refers to Bruno’s early heresies on Transubstantiation and the Virginity of Mary.  He alludes to the Spaccio della Bestia Trionfante, as though it had been a libel on the Pope.[118]