How well he recollected the enthusiasms of 1579! How ardent his friends were that his immense learning should signalise itself in the great national strife with the powers of darkness! If he could only live his life again with the old enthusiasm and the added knowledge of a life that should combine learning and action! The boy, Dacre, blessed with genius, wealth, high birth and noble aspirations--how wide the horizon that opened before him! For Matthew Makepeace it rested only to be forgotten before he died. It was a strange bird of passage that had dropped the seed from which Matthew’s book grew. Alessandro Galiani was a medical doctor of Padua University when he came to Cambridge, and for a few months resided in Jesus College. Why he came nobody precisely knew; but he claimed to be a Protestant refugee, and he was certainly profoundly learned in many languages, as well as in medicine. He brought letters of introduction from the Chancellor, Lord Burleigh, and it was surmised that he was an agent of the Government, engaged to report on the University. But his talk and conduct were so equivocal that the suspicion presently arose that his Protestantism was simulated, and that he was a papal spy. The sentiments to which he gave expression were certainly Macchiavellian in the highest degree--intolerable to English ears. Wherefore his sojourn at Cambridge ended abruptly after a few months, and he passed away into the same mysterious spaces from which he had come. He was a man of extraordinary powers of observation and suggestion, and from a chance hint that he once let fall Makepeace got the idea of writing his book. It was Galiani who directed his attention to the Jewish and Arabic authors whom he consulted. But how little of the force and insight of the Italian entered into the completed book, Makepeace knew only too well. So the book lay on the table and Matthew had no heart to open it. Through the window came sounds of merriment from the Fair Yard without. Regularly as August came round Makepeace had heard those sounds for forty years past, but until to-day he had regarded them only as a troublesome distraction, and closed his casement against them. To-day a profound lassitude made him draw his stool from the table, where lay the slighted volume, to the open window. His attention was especially drawn by a strident voice which came from near his chamber. Looking out on the Fair Yard he saw a platform of a few planks, mounted on casks, immediately beneath his window. On it a vagabond charlatan was loudly advertising to a group of gaping rustics the merits of a wonderful heal-all.