programme had been carried through (on the 1st of July)--the _Oratio Consolatoria_.[96] Bruno professes as his reason for wishing to speak that he must express his gratitude to one who had made the university he founded free to all lovers of the Muses, even to strangers such as Bruno himself was:--an exile from his Italian fatherland for honourable reasons and zeal for the truth, here he had received the freedom of the university: in Italy he was exposed to the greedy maw of the Roman wolf--here he was in safety: there he had been chained to a superstitious and absurd cult--here he was exhorted to more reformed rites. What is remarkable in this speech is the bitterness of Bruno's personal attack upon Rome, and "the violent tyranny of the Tiberine beast." The constellations are allegorically treated as symbols of the virtues of Julius, or of the vices which he attacked and repressed: among them "the head of the Gorgon, on which for hair there grow venomous snakes, representing that monster of perverse Papal tyranny, which has tongues more numerous than the hairs of the head, aiding and serving it, each and all blasphemous against God, nature, and man, infecting the world with the rankest poison of ignorance and vice." It was indeed strange that Bruno should have thought of entering Italy after publishing words like these. [Sidenote: Excommunication of Bruno in Helmstadt.] [Sidenote: Oct. 6, 1589.] [Sidenote: 1590.] However, he was not to find the Protestants much more tolerant than the Catholics. In the university archives there is extant a letter from him to the prorector of the academy, appealing against a public excommunication of himself by the first pastor and superintendent of the church at Helmstadt, Boethius. According to this letter, Boethius had made himself both judge and executioner, without giving the Italian a hearing at all: and the letter appealed to the senate and rector against the public execution of an unjust sentence, privately passed; it demanded a hearing, so that if any legal derogation were to be made from his rank and good name, he might at least feel it to be justly made, and demanded that Boethius be summoned to show he had not fulminated his bolt out of private malice, but in pursuance of the duty of a good pastor on behalf of his sheep. The date of the letter is October 6, 1589. No further records of the affair have been found, so that the appeal was probably rejected. The meaning of the excommunication is not quite clear: Bruno does not seem to have been a full member of either the reformed or the Lutheran church, although attending services; and in all probability the sentence was a formal one, which, however, carried serious social inconveniences with it. The prorector, Hofmann, was not one to sympathise either with Bruno or with his philosophy; he was unhappy unless attacking some other person's opinions: philosophy in general fell under his condemnation, although he professed knowledge of it.