Those of us who are in the habit of receiving letters from all sorts of would-be-literary people—­letters of inquiry, many of them with reference to matters we are supposed to understand—­can readily see how it was that Mr. De Morgan, never too busy to be good-natured with the people who pestered—­or amused-him with their queer fancies, received such a number of letters from persons who thought they had made great discoveries, from those who felt that they and their inventions and contrivances had been overlooked, and who sought in his large charity of disposition and great receptiveness a balm for their wounded feelings and a ray of hope for their darkened prospects.

The book before us is made up from papers published in “The Athenaeum,” with additions by the author.  Soon after opening it we come to names with which we are familiar, the first of these, that of Cornelius Agrippa, being connected with the occult and mystic doctrines dealt with by many of De Morgan’s correspondents.  But the name most likely to arrest us is that of Giordano Bruno, the same philosopher, heretic, and martyr whose statue has recently been erected in Rome, to the great horror of the Pope and his prelates in the Old World and in the New.  De Morgan’s pithy account of him will interest the company:  “Giordano Bruno was all paradox.  He was, as has been said, a vorticist before Descartes, an optimist before Leibnitz, a Copernican before Galileo.  It would be easy to collect a hundred strange opinions of his.  He was born about 1550, and was roasted alive at Rome, February 17, 1600, for the maintenance and defence of the Holy Church, and the rights and liberties of the same.”

Number Seven could not contain himself when the reading had reached this point.  He rose from his chair, and tinkled his spoon against the side of his teacup.  It may have been a fancy, but I thought it returned a sound which Mr. Richard Briggs would have recognized as implying an organic defect.  But Number Seven did not seem to notice it, or, if he did, to mind it.

“Why did n’t we all have a chance to help erect that statue?” he cried.  “A murdered heretic at the beginning of the seventeenth century, a hero of knowledge in the nineteenth,—­I drink to the memory of the roasted crank, Giordano Bruno!”

Number Seven lifted his teacup to his lips, and most of us followed his example.

After this outburst of emotion and eloquence had subsided, and the teaspoons lay quietly in their saucers, I went on with my extract from the book I had in hand.

I think, I said, that the passage which follows will be new and instructive to most of the company.  De Morgan’s interpretation of the cabalistic sentence, made up as you will find it, is about as ingenious a piece of fanciful exposition as you will be likely to meet with anywhere in any book, new or old.  I am the more willing to mention it as it suggests a puzzle which some of the company may like to work upon.  Observe the character and position of the two distinguished philosophers who did not think their time thrown away in laboring at this seemingly puerile task.