have
purchased his life. As Breugger wrote with brutal crudity to Kepler:
'What profit did he gain by enduring such torments? If there were no God
to punish crimes, as he believed, could he not have pretended any thing
to save his life?' We may add that the alternative to death for a
relapsed apostate was perpetual incarceration; and seven years of prison
may well have made Bruno prefer death with honor.]

Just five years before this memorable 17th of February, Tasso had passed
quietly away in S. Onofrio. 'How dissimilar in genius and fortune,'
exclaims Berti, 'were these men, though born under the same skies,
though in childhood they breathed the same air! Tasso a Christian and
poet of the cross; Bruno hostile to all religious symbols. The one,
tired and disillusioned of the world, ends his days in the repose of the
convent; the other sets out from the convent to expire upon the
scaffold, turning his eyes away from the crucifix.'[122] And yet how
much alike in some important circumstances of their lives were these two
men! Both wanderers, possessed by that spirit of vagrancy which is the
outward expression of an inner restlessness. The unfrocked friar, the
courtier out of service, had no home in Italy. Both were pursued by an
oestrum corresponding to the intellectual perturbations which closed the
sixteenth century, so different from the idyllic calm that rested upon
Ariosto and the artists of its opening years. Sufficient justice has not
yet been done in history to the Italian wanderers and exiles of this
period, men who carried the spirit of the Renaissance abroad, after the
Renaissance had ended in Italy, to the extremest verges of the civilized
world. An enumeration of their names, an examination of their services
to modern thought, would show how puissant was the intellectual
influence of Italy in that period of her political decadence.[123]

[Footnote 122: _op. cit._ p. 70.]

[Footnote 123: Both Berti and Quinet have made similar remarks, which,
indeed, force themselves upon a student of the sixteenth century.]

Bruno has to be treated from two distinct but interdependent points of
view--in his relation to contemporary thought and the Renaissance; and
in his relation to the evolution of modern philosophy--as the critic of
mediaeval speculation and the champion of sixteenth-century enthusiasm;
and also as the precursor of Descartes, Spinoza, Leibnitz, Schelling,
Hegel, Darwin.

From the former of these two