uncanonical in cut, and of not reciting the Salve Regina.  After a solemn trial, Sarpi was acquitted; and it came to be proverbially whispered that ’even the slippers of the incorruptible Fra Paolo had been canonized.’  Being a sincere Catholic at heart, as well as a man of profound learning and prudent speech, his papalistic enemies could get no grip upon him.  Yet they instinctively hated and dreaded one whom they felt to be opposed, in his strength, fearlessness and freedom of soul, to their exorbitant pretensions and underhand aggressions upon public liberties.  His commerce with heretics both in correspondence with learned Frenchmen and in conversation with distinguished foreigners at Venice, was made a ground of accusation, and Clement VIII. declared that this alone sufficed to exclude him from any dignity in the Church.

It does not appear that Sarpi troubled his head about these things.  Had he cared for power, there was no distinction to which he might not have aspired by stooping to common arts and by compromising his liberty of conscience.  But he was indifferent to rank and wealth.  Public business he discharged upon occasion from a sense of duty to his Order.  For the rest, so long as he was left to pursue his studies in tranquillity, Sarpi had happiness enough; and his modesty was so great that he did not even seek to publish the results of his discoveries in science.  For this reason they have now been lost to the world; only the memory of them surviving in the notes of Foscarini and Grisellini, who inspected his MSS. before they were accidentally destroyed by fire in 1769.

Though renowned through Europe as the orbis terrae ocellus, the man sought out by every visitor to Venice as the rarest citizen of the Republic, Sarpi might have quitted this earthly scene with only the faint fame of a thinker whose eminent gifts blossomed in obscurity, had it not been for a public opportunity which forced him to forsake his studies and his cell for a place at the Council-board and for the functions of a polemical writer.  That robust manliness of mind, which makes an Englishman hail English virtues in Sarpi, led him to affirm that ’every man of excellence is bound to pay attention to politics.’[131] Yet politics were not his special sphere.  Up to the age of fifty-four he ripened in the assiduous studies of which I have made mention, in the discharge of his official duties as a friar, and his religious duties as a priest.  He had distinguished himself amid the practical affairs of life by judicial acuteness, unswerving justice, infallible perspicacity, and inexhaustible stores of erudition brought to bear with facility on every detail of any matter in dispute.  But nature and inclination seemed to mark him out through early manhood for experimental and speculative science rather than for action.  Now a demand was made on his deep fount of energy, which evolved the latent forces of a character unique in many-sided strength.