It would tax the power of the greatest creative dramatist to draw two conceivable human beings who should differ so widely as Tasso and his only Italian contemporary who can be said to stand on a corresponding level of genius--Giordano Bruno. The Nolan, to give him the title which he habitually used, was probably the more considerable man of the two in intrinsic power, while both his life and his character are more interesting. But then he is incomparably more difficult to understand. I cannot profess to deal with what, to the majority of those who have paid much attention to his work, is most valuable in him--his philosophic ideas, and the influence he may have had on later thinkers. His life is of the kind which it is a pleasure to tell, in spite of the final tragedy, so full is it of incident and of manifestations of a certain stamp of character.[119] Giordano Bruno was born at Nola, near Naples, in 1548. His father was a soldier, and his mother a German woman. He became a Dominican friar very early, and his unruly character brought him speedily into difficulties with his superiors. Before he was twenty he fled from his Order, and escaped to Geneva by way of Genoa. This was in 1576. For fourteen years he led a wandering life. His movements can be traced from Geneva to Lyons, thence to Toulouse, Paris, England, once more to Paris, and from thence to Wittenberg, Prague, and Frankfort. Wherever he went he asked leave to teach, and he speedily entangled himself in a quarrel with the authorities. He defended the doctrines of Copernicus, and he expounded, more or less obscurely, his doctrines on the soul and the nature of man. Bruno had an “art of memory” which was founded upon, or was an adaptation of, the curious reasoning machine invented by Raymond Lully, the Catalan scholastic and mystic of the thirteenth century. Even if I could profess to understand his doctrines, which I do not, this would not be the place to expound them. What does appear very clearly is, that he was a man of extreme and passionate arrogance. The doctrine he most certainly held is, that the Nolan was the one man who had even a glimpse of the only important truths, and that official teachers who did not accept him at his own valuation were pigs, dogs, brutes, and beasts. He poured these epithets over the heads of houses at Oxford, whither he had been taken by Sir Philip Sidney, who was kind to him, and on whom he may have had some influence. The only place in which he escaped a violent quarrel with authority was at Wittenberg. Even there he could not rest, and he committed himself to a public and sweeping denunciation of the Papacy. At last he received an invitation from a Venetian _magnifico_ of the house of Mocenigo to come and be his teacher. Mocenigo had heard of Bruno’s “art of memory,” and probably also believed him to be a wizard who could make gold. In an evil hour Bruno accepted the invitation, and went to Venice on the hopeless