onvent of S.
Maria sopra Minerva, it was as a culprit condemned to death by the
Inquisition.

At Noli Bruno gained a living for about five months by teaching grammar
to boys and lecturing in private to some gentlefolk upon the Sphere. The
doctrine of the Sphere formed a somewhat miscellaneous branch of
mediaeval science. It embraced the exposition of Ptolemaic astronomy,
together with speculations on the locality of heaven, the motive
principle of the world, and the operation of angelical intelligences.
Bruno, who professed this subject at various times throughout his
wanderings, began now to use it as a vehicle for disseminating
Copernican opinions. It is certain that cosmography formed the basis of
his philosophy, and this may be ascribed to his early occupation with
the sphere. But his restless spirit would not suffer him to linger in
those regions where olive and orange and palm flourish almost more
luxuriantly than in his native Nola. The gust of travel was upon him. A
new philosophy occupied his brain, vertiginously big with incoherent
births of modern thought. What Carlyle called 'the fire in the belly'
burned and irritated his young blood. Unsettled, cast adrift from
convent moorings, attainted for heresy, out of sympathy with resurgent
Catholicism, he became a Vagus Quidam--a wandering student, like the
Goliardi of the Middle Ages. From Noli he passed to Savona; from Savona
to Turin; from Turin to Venice. There his feet might perhaps have found
rest; for Venice was the harbor of all vagrant spirits in that age. But
the city was laid waste with plague. Bruno wrote a little book, now
lost, on 'The Signs of the Times,' and lived upon the sale of it for
some two months. Then he removed to Padua. Here friends persuaded him to
reassume the cowl. There were more than 40,000 monks abroad in Italy,
beyond the limits of their convent. Why should not he avail himself of
house-roof in his travels, a privilege which was always open to friars?
From Padua he journeyed rapidly again through Brescia, Bergamo and Milan
to Turin, crossed Mont Cenis, tarried at Chambery, and finally betook
himself to Geneva.

Geneva was no fit resting-place for Bruno. He felt an even fiercer
antipathy for dissenting than for orthodox bigotry. The despotism of a
belligerent and persecuting sectarian seemed to him more intolerable,
because less excusable, than the Catholic despotism from which he was
escaping. Galeazzo Caracciolo, Marquis of Vico,