But during all these years, while elaborating opinions on the weightiest matters of state for the Venetian Senate, and sending out this series of books which so powerfully influenced the attitude of his own and after generations toward the Vatican, he was working with great effect in yet another field. With the possible exception of Voltaire, he was the most vigorous and influential letter-writer during the three hundred years which separated Erasmus from Thomas Jefferson. Voltaire certainly spread his work over a larger field, lighted it with more wit, and gained by it more brilliant victories; but as regards accurate historical knowledge, close acquaintance with statesmen, familiarity with the best and worst which statesmen could do, sober judgment and cogent argument, the great Venetian was his superior. Curiously enough, Sarpi resembles the American statesman more closely than either of the Europeans. Both he and Jefferson had the intense practical interest of statesmen, not only in the welfare of their own countries, but in all the political and religious problems of their times. Both were keenly alive to progress in the physical sciences, wherever made. Both were wont to throw a light veil of humor over very serious discussions. Both could use, with great effect, curt, caustic description: Jefferson's letter to Governor Langdon satirizing the crowned heads of Europe, as he had seen them, has a worthy pendant in Fra Paolo's pictures of sundry representatives of the Vatican. In both these writers was a deep earnestness which, at times, showed itself in prophetic utterances. The amazing prophecy of Jefferson against American slavery, beginning with the words, "I tremble when I remember that God is just," which, in the light of our civil war, seems divinely inspired, is paralleled by some of Sarpi's utterances against the unmoral tendencies of Jesuitism and Ultramontanism; and these too seem divinely inspired as one reads them in the light of what has happened since in Spain, in Sicily, in Naples, in Poland, in Ireland, and in sundry South American republics. The range of Sarpi's friendly relations was amazing. They embraced statesmen, churchmen, scholars, scientific investigators, diplomatists in every part of Europe, and among these Galileo and Lord Bacon, Grotius and Mornay, Salmasius and Casaubon, De Thou and Sir Henry Wotton, Bishop Bedell and Vossius, with a great number of others of nearly equal rank. Unfortunately the greater part of his correspondence has perished. In the two small volumes collected by Polidori, and in the small additional volume of letters to Simon Contarini, Venetian Ambassador at Rome, unearthed a few years since in the Venetian archives by Castellani, we have all that is known. It is but a small fraction of his epistolary work, but it enables us to form a clear opinion. The letters are well worthy of the man who wrote the history of the Council of Trent and the protest of Venice against the Interdict.