the advance of relative knowledge to be but catalogues of some few objects apprehended by the vision of each partially-instructed age.  We have, indeed, reason to marvel how many of Bruno’s intuitions have formed the stuff of later, more elaborated systems, and still remain the best which these contain.  We have reason to wonder how many of his divinations have worked themselves into the common fund of modern beliefs, and have become philosophical truisms.

It is probable that if Bruno’s career had not been cut short by the dungeon and the stake at the early age of thirty-four, he might have produced some final work in which his theories would have assumed a formal shape.  It is possible that the Vatican even now contains the first sketch for such a studied exposition in the treatise on the Seven Arts, which Giovanni Mocenigo handed over to the Inquisition, and which the philosopher intended to dedicate to Clement VIII.  But the loss of this elaborated system is hardly to be regretted, except for the clearer light it must have thrown upon the workings of the most illuminated intellect in the sixteenth century.  We know that it could not have revealed to us the secret of things.

Bruno cast his thoughts in two molds:  the dialogue, and Latin hexameters.  He was attracted to the latter by his early study of Parmenides and Lucretius.  The former seems to have been natural to the man.  We must not forget that he was a Neapolitan, accustomed from childhood to the farces of his native land, vividly alive to the comic aspects of existence, and joyously appreciative of reality.  His first known composition was a comedy, Il Candelajo; and something of the drama can be traced in all those Italian compositions which distinguish the period of his activity as an author in London.  Lucian rather than Plato or Cicero determined the form of his dialogue.  An element of the burlesque distinguishes his method of approaching religious and moral problems in the Spaccio della Bestia, and the Cavallo Pegaseo.  And though he exchanged the manner of his model for more serious exposition in the trio of metaphysical dialogues, named La Cena delle Ceneri, Della Causa, and Dell’ Infinito Universo, yet the irresistible tendency to dramatic satire emerges even there in the description of England and in the characters of the indispensable pedant buffoon.  His dialogue on the Eroici Furori is sustained at a high pitch of aspiring fervor.  Mystical in its attempt to adumbrate the soul’s thirst for truth and beauty, it adopts the method of a running commentary upon poems, in the manner of a discursive and fantastic Vita Nuova.  In his Italian style, Bruno owed much to the fashion set by Aretino.  The study of Aretino’s comedies is apparent in Il Candelajo.  The stringing together of words and ideas in triplets, balanced by a second set of words and ideas in antithetical triplets—­this trick of rhetoric, which wearies