Bruno has been zealously blackened by Catholic writers for the obscenity of some of his writing [219] and the alleged freedom of his life--piquant charges, when we remember the life of the Papal Italy in which he was born. Lucilio Vanini (otherwise Julius Cæsar Vanini), the next martyr of freethought, also an Italian (b. at Taurisano, 1585), is open to the more relevant charges of an inordinate vanity and some duplicity. Figuring as a Carmelite friar, which he was not, he came to England (1612) and deceitfully professed to abjure Catholicism, [220] gaining, however, nothing by the step, and contriving to be reconciled to the Church, after being imprisoned for forty-nine days on an unrecorded charge. Previously he had figured, like Bruno, as a wandering scholar at Amsterdam, Brussels, Cologne, Geneva, and Lyons; and afterwards he taught natural philosophy for a year at Genoa. His treatise, Amphitheatrum Æterna Providentiæ (Lyons, 1615), is professedly directed against "ancient philosophers, Atheists, Epicureans, Peripatetics, and Stoics," and is ostensibly quite orthodox. [221] In one passage he untruthfully tells how, when imprisoned in England, he burned with the desire to shed his blood for the Catholic Church. [222] In another, after declaring that some Christian doctors have argued very weakly against the Epicureans on immortality, he avows that he, "Christianus nomine cognomine Catholicus," could hardly have held the doctrine if he had not learned it from the Church, "the most certain and infallible mistress of truth." [223] As usual, the attack leaves us in doubt as to the amount of real atheism current at the time. The preface asserts that "Atheotêto autem secta pestilentissima quotidie, latius et latius vires acquirit eundo," and there are various hostile allusions to atheists in the text; [224] but the arguments cited from them are such as might be brought by deists against miracles and the Christian doctrine of sin; and there is an allusion of the customary kind to "Nicolaus Machiavellus Atheorum facile princeps," [225] which puts all in doubt. The later published Dialogues, De Admirandis Naturæ Arcanis, [226] while showing a freer critical spirit, would seem to be in part earlier in composition, if we can trust the printer's preface, which represents them as collected from various quarters, and published only with the reluctant consent of the author. [227] This, of course, may be a mystification; in any case the Dialogues twice mention the Amphitheatrum; and the fourth book, in which this mention occurs, may be taken on this and other grounds to set forth his later ideas. Even the Dialogues, however, while discussing many questions of creed and science in a free fashion, no less profess orthodoxy; and, while one passage is pantheistic, [228] they also denounce atheism. [229] And whereas one passage does avow that the author in his Amphitheatrum had said many things he did not believe,