as soon as the old pedant’s back was turned, took his place, and, to the delight of the students, found for him—­provided it were there—­what he could not find himself;—­how he went body-snatching and gibbet-robbing, often at the danger of his life, as when he and his friend were nearly torn to pieces by the cannibal dogs who haunted the Butte de Montfaucon, or place of public execution;—­how he acquired, by a long and dangerous process, the only perfect skeleton then in the world, and the hideous story of the robber to whom it had belonged—­all these horrors those who list may read for themselves elsewhere.  I hasten past them with this remark—­that to have gone through the toils, dangers, and disgusts which Vesalius faced, argued in a superstitious and cruel age like his, no common physical and moral courage, and a deep conscience that he was doing right, and must do it at all risks in the face of a generation which, peculiarly reckless of human life and human agony, allowed that frame which it called the image of God to be tortured, maimed, desecrated in every way while alive; and yet—­straining at the gnat after having swallowed the camel—­forbade it to be examined when dead, though for the purpose of alleviating the miseries of mankind.

The breaking out of war between Francis I. and Charles V. drove Vesalius back to his native country and Louvain; and in 1535 we hear of him as a surgeon in Charles V.’s army.  He saw, most probably, the Emperor’s invasion of Provence, and the disastrous retreat from before Montmorency’s fortified camp at Avignon, through a country in which that crafty general had destroyed every article of human food, except the half-ripe grapes.  He saw, perhaps, the Spanish soldiers, poisoned alike by the sour fruit and by the blazing sun, falling in hundreds along the white roads which led back into Savoy, murdered by the peasantry whose homesteads had been destroyed, stifled by the weight of their own armour, or desperately putting themselves, with their own hands, out of a world which had become intolerable.  Half the army perished.  Two thousand corpses lay festering between Aix and Frejus alone.  If young Vesalius needed “subjects,” the ambition and the crime of man found enough for him in those blazing September days.

He went to Italy, probably with the remnants of the army.  Where could he have rather wished to find himself?  He was at last in the country where the human mind seemed to be growing young once more; the country of revived arts, revived sciences, learning, languages; and—­though, alas, only for a while—­of revived free thought, such as Europe had not seen since the palmy days of Greece.  Here at least he would be appreciated; here at least he would be allowed to think and speak:  and he was appreciated.  The Italian cities, who were then, like the Athenians of old, “spending their time in nothing else save to hear or to tell something new,” welcomed the brave young Fleming and his novelties.  Within two years he was professor of anatomy at Padua, then the first school in the world; then at Bologna and at Pisa at the same time; last of all at Venice, where Titian painted that portrait of him which remains unto this day.