governing motives must have been an eternal and inviolable impulse towards Truth, an unbending sense of right, an irrepressible and free enthusiasm." That for which he died was not any special cult or any special interpretation of Scripture or history, but a broad freedom of thought with the right of free interpretation of history and of nature, which in his own case was founded upon a philosophy, one of the noblest that has been thought out by man. The fear of death was no part of this philosophy; what we call death, it teaches, is a mere change of state, of "accidents"--no real substance, such as the human spirit is, can ever die. One of the highest values of his philosophy he thought to be this, that it freed man from the fear of death, "which is worse than death itself." Strikingly apposite to his own fate is a passage from Ovid[130] that he quotes-- O' genus attonitum gelidae formidine mortis, Quid Styga, quid tenebras, et nomina vana timetis, Materiam vatum, falsique pericula mundi? Corpora sive rogus flamma, seu tabe vetustas Abstulerit, mala posse pati non ulla putetis; Morte carent animae domibus habitantque receptae. Bruno himself lived within the sphere of which he writes in the _Spaccio_, "surrounded by the impregnable wall of true philosophic contemplation, where the peacefulness of life stands fortified and on high, where truth is open, where the necessity of the Eternity of all substantial things is clear, where nought is to be feared but to be deprived of human perfection and justice." His finest epitaph is to be found in his own words, "I have fought: that is much--victory is in the hands of fate. Be that as it may with me, this at least future ages will not deny of me, be the victor who may,--that I did not fear to die, yielded to none of my fellows in constancy, and preferred a spirited death to a cowardly life." No end in history is more tragic, when looked at in all its circumstances, than that of Giordano Bruno. First a life of endless, unresting struggle, striving through years of wandering, in many lands, to overcome prejudice and outworn authority, to proclaim and urge on unwilling minds the splendid gospel which inspired himself, and by which for a brief time he may have thought to supplant the old; now admired of kings, and sought after by the highest in the land, at another time a hunted pedlar of literary wares; then eight years in darkness from the world, with shame or death to choose for release. The choice made for the nobler end, the mockeries of religion he had detested and reviled pursued him to the end to--the very stake; and the funeral pyre of this martyr for liberty of thought, for the new light of science, became a spectacle for the gay and thoughtless sight-seers of the Roman Jubilee year, to all of whom, one sad disciple excepted, it was but another "damnable and obstinate heretic" who was on this earth, for that brief spell, foretasting his eternal doom. XIX