In English writers the only contemporary notices of Bruno which have been found are in two small works on mnemonics,--one by a professed opponent of Bruno's friend, Alexander Dicson, the other by the poet Thomas Watson. The former, the _Anti-dicsonus_ of a certain Cambridge scholar, G. P., of date 1584, was dedicated to Thomas Moffat or Moufet, a well-known philosopher and doctor of medicine, from whom support was hoped against the "Dicson School." Of this school Bruno, who was then in England, must have been regarded as a member. The author is a follower of Ramus, and ridicules the art of memory which consists in _locis et umbris_ and its "self-parading memoriographs, such as Metrodorus, Rosselius, _the Nolan_, and Dicson; these are the reefs and whirlpools in which the purer science of memory would have been wholly destroyed, had she not clung to her faith in the Rameans as a pillar of refuge." It is an interesting note, for it shows that Bruno's antipathy to Ramus was returned by Ramus' followers,--an antipathy so difficult to understand when we remember that both were reformers in philosophy, and that both zealously attacked Aristotle. The work against which G. P. writes is Alexander Dicson's _De Umbra rationis et iudicii, sive de memoriae virtute Prosopopoeia_, dedicated to the Earl of Leicester (1583). There can be no doubt that it is based upon Bruno's _De Umbris Idearum_ (1582), with which it agrees both in substance and in metaphysical basis. Dicson, as already pointed out, was one of Bruno's mouthpieces in an Italian dialogue. Here at least is an avenue for influence from Bruno upon English thought. Unfortunately Dicson's work is not of great value, and, with the man himself, has long been forgotten. But G. P.'s reliance upon Moffat's support to repel "the attacks of Scepsius,[607] and the wrath and violence towards me of the whole school of Dicson," shows that on the side, at any rate, of his mnemonic doctrine Bruno's teaching had not fallen on wholly barren soil. Again, he is spoken of with respect, if not quite with admiration, in Thomas Watson's dedication of his _Compendium Memoriae Localis_ (n. d., but probably 1585) to Henry Noël, Queen Elizabeth's courtier. "I very much fear if my little work (_nugae meae_) is compared with the mystical and deeply learned _Sigilli_ of the Nolan, or with the _Umbra artificiosa_ of Dicson, it may bring more infamy to its author than utility to the reader." The scholarly poet, terse and brilliant Latinist, could hardly have felt in harmony with the passionate but confused thought, the virile but unscholarly style of Bruno; yet the art of memory he professes in this compendium is no other than that of Bruno and of Dicson, and the "Memoriographs," whom "G. P." attacks. [Sidenote: Bacon.]