rrespondence with learned Frenchmen and in conversation with
distinguished foreigners at Venice, was made a ground of accusation, and
Clement VIII. declared that this alone sufficed to exclude him from any
dignity in the Church.

It does not appear that Sarpi troubled his head about these things. Had
he cared for power, there was no distinction to which he might not have
aspired by stooping to common arts and by compromising his liberty of
conscience. But he was indifferent to rank and wealth. Public business
he discharged upon occasion from a sense of duty to his Order. For the
rest, so long as he was left to pursue his studies in tranquillity,
Sarpi had happiness enough; and his modesty was so great that he did not
even seek to publish the results of his discoveries in science. For this
reason they have now been lost to the world; only the memory of them
surviving in the notes of Foscarini and Grisellini, who inspected his
MSS. before they were accidentally destroyed by fire in 1769.

Though renowned through Europe as the _orbis terrae ocellus_, the man
sought out by every visitor to Venice as the rarest citizen of the
Republic, Sarpi might have quitted this earthly scene with only the
faint fame of a thinker whose eminent gifts blossomed in obscurity, had
it not been for a public opportunity which forced him to forsake his
studies and his cell for a place at the Council-board and for the
functions of a polemical writer. That robust manliness of mind, which
makes an Englishman hail English virtues in Sarpi, led him to affirm
that 'every man of excellence is bound to pay attention to
politics.'[131] Yet politics were not his special sphere. Up to the age
of fifty-four he ripened in the assiduous studies of which I have made
mention, in the discharge of his official duties as a friar, and his
religious duties as a priest. He had distinguished himself amid the
practical affairs of life by judicial acuteness, unswerving justice,
infallible perspicacity, and inexhaustible stores of erudition brought
to bear with facility on every detail of any matter in dispute. But
nature and inclination seemed to mark him out through early manhood for
experimental and speculative science rather than for action. Now a
demand was made on his deep fount of energy, which evolved the latent
forces of a character unique in many-sided strength. He had dedicated
himself to religion and to the pursuit of knowledge. But he was a
Venetian of the V