[Footnote 119:  We may remember that while a novice at Naples, he first got into trouble by keeping the crucifix as the only religious symbol which he respected, when he parted with images of saints.]

No cry, no groan, escaped his lips.  Thus, as Scioppius affectedly remarked, ’he perished miserably in flames, and went to report in those other worlds of his imagination, how blasphemous and impious men are handled by the Romans.’

Whatever we may think of the good taste of Bruno’s sarcasms upon the faith in which he had been bred—­and it is certain that he never rightly apprehended Christianity in its essence—­there is no doubt he died a valiant martyr to the truth as he conceived it.  ’His death like that of Paleario, Carnesecchi, and so many more, no less than countless exiles suffered for religious causes, are a proof that in Italy men had begun to recognize their obligation to a faith, the duty of obedience to a thought:  an immense progress, not sufficiently appreciated even by modern historians.’[120] Bruno was a hero in the battle for the freedom of the conscience, for the right of man to think and speak in liberty.[121]

[Footnote 120:  These pregnant words are in Berti’s Vita di G.B. p. 299.]

[Footnote 121:  He well deserves this name, in spite of his recantation at Venice; for it seems incredible that he could not by concessions have purchased his life.  As Breugger wrote with brutal crudity to Kepler:  ’What profit did he gain by enduring such torments?  If there were no God to punish crimes, as he believed, could he not have pretended any thing to save his life?’ We may add that the alternative to death for a relapsed apostate was perpetual incarceration; and seven years of prison may well have made Bruno prefer death with honor.]

Just five years before this memorable 17th of February, Tasso had passed quietly away in S. Onofrio.  ‘How dissimilar in genius and fortune,’ exclaims Berti, ’were these men, though born under the same skies, though in childhood they breathed the same air!  Tasso a Christian and poet of the cross; Bruno hostile to all religious symbols.  The one, tired and disillusioned of the world, ends his days in the repose of the convent; the other sets out from the convent to expire upon the scaffold, turning his eyes away from the crucifix.’[122] And yet how much alike in some important circumstances of their lives were these two men!  Both wanderers, possessed by that spirit of vagrancy which is the outward expression of an inner restlessness.  The unfrocked friar, the courtier out of service, had no home in Italy.  Both were pursued by an oestrum corresponding to the intellectual perturbations which closed the sixteenth century, so different from the idyllic calm that rested upon Ariosto and the artists of its opening years.  Sufficient justice has not yet been done in history to the Italian wanderers and exiles of this period, men who carried the spirit of the Renaissance abroad, after the Renaissance had ended in Italy, to the extremest verges of the civilized world.  An enumeration of their names, an examination of their services to modern thought, would show how puissant was the intellectual influence of Italy in that period of her political decadence.[123]