great favours enjoyed from you, food and shelter, freedom, safety, harbourage, who through you have escaped so terrible and fierce a storm, to you consecrate this anchor, these shrouds and slackened sails, this merchandise so dear to me, more precious still to the future world, to the end that through your favour they may not fall a prey to the ocean of injustice, turbulence, and hostility." The merchandise of which Bruno thought so highly was the Dialogue itself; we must of course allow for the grandiloquence of the dedications of the time, and of Bruno's especially, but a real gratitude shines through the words. [Sidenote: Queen Elizabeth.] [Sidenote: Mendoça.] His account of the Queen must be taken much less seriously, although his praise of her formed one of the many counts against him in Venice. "That most singular and rare of ladies, who from this cold clime, near to the Arctic parallel, sheds a bright light upon all the terrestrial globe. Elizabeth, a Queen in title and in dignity, inferior to no King in all the world. For her judgment, counsel, and government, not easily second to any other that bears a sceptre in the earth. In her familiarity with the arts, knowledge of the sciences, understanding and practice of all languages spoken in Europe by the people or by the learned, I leave the whole world to judge what rank she should hold among princes."[54] In a satirical passage of the _Causa_, where Bruno is proving that all vices, defects, crimes are masculine, all virtues, excellences, goodnesses, feminine, Elizabeth is given as a crowning example:--"than whom no man is more worthy in the whole kingdom, among the nobles no one more heroic, among the long robed no one more learned, among the councillors no one more wise."[55] Exaggerated as the language is, it is not more so than was common with the writers who adorned Elizabeth's Court; and it was one of his errors which Bruno could easily regret before his judges. "In my book on 'the Cause, Principle, and One,' I praise the Queen of England and call her 'divine,' not as a term of worship, but as an epithet such as the ancients used to apply to their princes, and in England where I then was, and where I composed this book, the title 'divine' is usually given to the Queen. I was the more inclined to call her so, that she knew me, as I went continually with the Ambassador to Court; but I know I erred in praising this lady, she being a heretic, and in calling her 'divine.'" Through Mauvissière, Bruno made acquaintance with Bernardino di Mendoça, Spanish Ambassador to England from 1578 to 1584, a much stronger man as well as a more unscrupulous servant of his king than Mauvissière could be. Bruno says definitely that Mendoça was known by him at the English Court. So well was he known that Bruno approached the Ambassador in Paris on the delicate subject of his own relations with the Catholic Church, and was introduced by him to the Papal Nuncio.