One might, of course, do better business by dropping it as a _Scottish_ review, and starting another English magazine in London under the same name, and with a continuity of numeration. This, however, would be to destroy in its very essence the attempt to keep going a Scottish quarterly in Scotland. It must be owned that the apathy of the Scottish public is quite enough to drive any one to such a course, and it would be entirely their own fault if it were taken. [Sidenote: 1888, Bute's historical method] A typical example of Bute's method of treating subjects drawn from the byways of history may be seen in his studies on the trial and execution of Giordano Bruno,[2] whose memory a noisy party in Italy was at that time (1888) endeavouring to exalt as that of an innocent victim and martyr. The opinion of educated Catholics might have been thought pretty well made up as to the justice of the {140} sentence on the notorious Neapolitan philosopher and ex-Dominican, of whom not a Roman Inquisitor, but a Protestant divine, had said that he was "a man of great capacity, with infinite knowledge, but not a particle of religion." Bute, however, approached the subject in his usual attitude of complete intellectual detachment, with no trace of _parti pris_. "There is much obscurity about the whole matter," he wrote from Sorrento on March 21, 1888, "but I flatter myself that my paper will at least be a triumph of impartiality, of absolutely colourless neutrality." It is sufficient to record here that his conclusion, after many months of patient sifting of evidence, much of it drawn from contemporary sources hitherto unexplored, was much the same as that of Bruno's accusers and judges in Venice and in Rome. He wrote as follows to Dr. Metcalfe, before his articles appeared in print: What I fail to understand is why they executed him at all. If the Church Courts had kept him to themselves and imprisoned him for life, he could not have done any one any harm, and might with advancing age have repudiated and repented some of his blasphemous utterances (one being that Christ was not God, but only a magician of extraordinary cunning).[3] In the case of this obscure and repulsive vagabond, whose chief literary work could not be printed to-day without the author being prosecuted for obscenity, there was surely no need of a terrible public example, such as might have been (and was) urged in the case of the burning of Servetus. {141} [Sidenote: 1888, Garibaldi's Autobiography] Equally characteristic of his zeal for what he calls "colourless neutrality" in the presentment of historic facts are his observations on a proposed article for the _Review_ on the autobiography of Garibaldi, then recently published. As to this he writes (February, 1888):