interfered with his activity.  He refused to treat himself as an invalid, never altered his course of life for any illness, and went about his daily avocations when men of laxer tissue would have taken to their bed.  His indifference to danger was that of the Stoic or the Mussulman.  During a period of fifteen years he knew that restless foes were continually lying in wait to compass his death by poison or the dagger.  Yet he could hardly be persuaded to use the most ordinary precautions.  ‘I am resolved,’ he wrote, in 1609, ’to give no thought whatever to these wretchednesses.  He who thinks too much of living knows not how to live well.  One is bound to die once; to be curious about the day or place or manner of dying is unprofitable.  Whatsoever is God’s will is good.’[128] As fear had no hold upon his nature, so was he wholly free from the dominion of the senses.  A woman’s name, if we except that of the Queen of France, is, I think, not once mentioned in his correspondence.  Even natural affections seem to have been obliterated; for he records nothing of his mother or his father or a sister who survived their deaths.  One suit of clothes sufficed him; and his cell was furnished with three hour-glasses, a picture of Christ in the Garden, and a crucifix raised above a human skull.

[Footnote 127:  We may remind our readers of Henri IV.’s parting words to Joseph Scaliger:  ’Est-il vrai que vous avez ete de Paris a Dijon sans aller a la selle?’]

[Footnote 128:  Lettere, vol. i. p. 239.]

His physical sensitiveness, developed by austerity of life, was of the highest acuteness.  Sight, touch, and taste in him acquired the most exquisite delicacy.  He was wont to say that he feared no poison in his food, since he could discriminate the least adulteration of natural flavors.  His mental perspicacity was equally subtle.  As a boy he could recite thirty lines of Virgil after hearing them read over once.  Books were not so much perused by him as penetrated at a glance; and what he had but casually noticed, never afterwards escaped his memory.  In the vast Venetian archives he could lay his hand on any document without referring to registers or catalogues.  The minutest details of houses visited or places passed through, remained indelibly engraved upon his memory.  The characters of men lay open to his insight through their physiognomy and gestures.  When new scientific instruments were submitted to his curiosity, he divined their uses and comprehended their mechanism without effort.  Thus endowed with a rare combination of physical and intellectual faculties, it is no wonder that Sarpi became one of the most learned men of his age or of any age.  He was an excellent Greek, Latin, and Hebrew scholar; an adequate master of the French and Spanish languages; profoundly versed in canon and civil law; accomplished in the erudition of classical and scholastic philosophy; thoroughly acquainted with secular and ecclesiastical