nobles who had military rank and reputation [this was the main cause alleged by Machiavelli to have enfeebled Florence], or from the people addicting themselves too exclusively to arts and merchandise. However this may have been, the mode of making war by mercenaries has been most pernicious, and during the long period it has already prevailed in Florence has led her citizens into ways of life, and made them contract habits so contrary to martial enterprise, that now, if any youth talks of going to the wars, he becomes in a manner infamous.' Another exception to the charge of tediousness which, not having the fear of Italian readers before our eyes, we have ventured to bring against good part of the 'stuffing' of the ten volumes before us, must be made in favour of the 'Storia Fiorentina,' which fills the third volume, and which may be considered as forming a sequel (though written earlier) to Machiavelli's Storie Fiorentine,' and an introduction to Guicciardini's great work, the famous (and tedious) Istoria d'Italia.' Of the style of this hitherto unpublished prelude to his larger history it may be enough to say that, like that of his Ricordi,' it has none of the conventional dignity of history. In this respect Guicciardini here stands in contrast with his later self, as arrayed in the ample academical robes of the classic historian. In the political doctrine deducible from his Florentine history he so far contrasts with Machiavelli that, while Guicciardini, as Signor Canestrini remarks, confined his desires to a better regulated government for Florence, and freedom for Italy, Machiavelli invoked the intervention of a Prince, an all-powerful Dictator, who, by whatever means- so they were efficacious-should succeed in the great enterprise of expelling the strangers who were tearing Italy in pieces. Guicciardini's historical style, in his 'first manner,' differs from Machiavelli's in that indescribable quality in which the prose of minds all-prosaic differs from the prose of poets. Guicciardini was an acknowledged master of prose-Machiavelli may rank with poets—and it would be difficult to find in the highest-wrought tragic descriptions of the historian such vivid images of the misery of the times which saw the sack of Rome, as in the following six lines of Machiavelli's Capitolo dell' Ambizione.' Sempre son le lor facce orrende e scure, Di lacrime la terra e sangue è pregna; We have given credit for painstaking as well as for patriotism to the experienced editor of these volumes. But there is one particular in which he fails to satisfy the fair and reasonable requirements of modern readers. He has neither favoured them with full tables of contents to each volume, nor with a general index to all the ten volumes. These are omissions too familiar in Italian as in German publications of bulk and weight. Signor Canestrini sends his readers voyaging through whole volumes without rudder or compass to find the passages he has thought worth noticing in his Preface. We have been tempted, in executing our critical function on this occasion, to wish that editorial delinquencies of this description could be visited with some of those severities of medieval political justice so frequent in Florentine history. Qualche tratto di fune would be no more than condign punishment for the neglect of editors to provide readers with those mere mechanical facilities for finding what they want in voluminous works like these, which no French and no judicious English editor ever fails to furnish. 30 II. GIORDANO BRUNO AND GALILEO. 1. Jordano Bruno. Par Christian Bartolmèss. 2 vols. Paris, 1846. 2. Vita di Giordano Bruno da Nola. Scritta da Domenico Berti. Firenze, 1868. 3. Galilée, les Droits de la Science et la Méthode des Sciences Physiques. Par Th. Henri Martin. Paris, 1868. 4. Il Processo Originale di Galileo Galilei. Pubblicato per la prima volta da Domenico Berti. Roma, 1876. 5. Galileo Galilei und die Römische Curie. Nach den authentischen Quellen. Von Karl von Gebler. Stuttgart, 1876. 6. Les Pièces du Procès de Galilée. Précédées d'un Avant-propos. Par Henri de l'Epinois. Rome-Paris, 1877. 7. Die Acten des Galilei'schen Processes. Nach der Vaticanischen Handschrift herausgegeben. Von Karl von Gebler. Stuttgart, 1877.1 No two characters in history invite a Plutarchian comparison and contrast more naturally than those of Giordano Bruno, the knight-errant of philosophy,' as he was nicknamed in his own time, and Galileo Galilei, the genuine martyr of exact science. Bruno and Galileo were the first conspicuous champions of the Copernican or Modern Astronomy, and the former first awakened towards it the ominous attention of the Holy Roman Inquisition. The Nolan philosopher-errant had unluckily preceded the Pisan professor in the popular exposition of the Copernican system, and he purposely placed that system in the light necessarily most obnoxious to ecclesiastical prejudices, by including in his view of it the unhesitating assumption of a plurality of inhabited worlds, peopled similarly to our earth. From that assumption he explicitly drew those heretical inferences which were afterwards fastened gratuitously on Galileo. Neither Copernicus before 1 From the Quarterly Review, April 1878. him, nor Galileo after him, hazarded any such speculations as to the manner in which the other planets of our system, or of other systems, might or might not be peopled. But Bruno revelled in them, and made them the main ground of his argument against the creed of Christendom and for the necessity of a new religion harmonising with the new astronomy. It was much as if Voltaire had preceded Newton, and had so treated astronomical questions as to create an inseparable association in the clerical and common mind between a revolution in science and a revolution in religion and morals. Galileo has been accused by all the apologists of his ecclesiastical persecutors of having gratuitously mixed up questions of science with questions of religion; and his imputed invasion of a province, which he had no legitimate motive to meddle with, has been described as having provoked that Papal crusade against modern astronomy which has damned Urban VIII. and his Holy Office to everlasting fame. Not a word of all this is true of Galileo. Every word of it is true of Giordano Bruno. Unlike as were the characters and careers of Bruno and Galileo-in every respect but irrepressible intellectual activity, however differently directedit is difficult to avoid the impression that the destinies of the former may have very considerably and unhappily influenced those of the latter. The Roman Inquisition successively pounced on both, though not, it must be admitted, with equal excess of severity. It burned Bruno, and never certainly had it lighted on human fuel more manifestly predestined, in that age, to burning. It only intimidated Galileo into solemn and deliberate perjury, into abjuration of truths he had clearly demonstrated and continued to hold, which his persecutors perfectly well knew that he continued to hold, and therefore, by extorting verbal abjuration of them from a harassed and infirm old man, made themselves mainly responsible for the hollow and hypocritical performance of what can only be designated as a most impious and sacrilegious farce. Giordano Bruno's is one of those names which, in the course of centuries, have gathered round them a sort of smoky glory. If he had fallen upon another age and another country-instead of being burnt at Rome, he might have shone brightly, as a professor of transcendental philosophy, at Berlin or Munich. He might have lectured, like Schelling, on The Absolute,' and 'The Point of Indifference between Extremes'-a position identical with the coincidentia oppositorum of Bruno-or, like Hegel, on The Unity of Existence and Thought,' and 'The Perpetual Evolution of the Idea.' It is mentioned amongst the multifarious mental occupations of the late Baron Bunsen, that he had studied Giordano Bruno with peculiar interest and with deep sympathy. The work of Bartolmèss of Strasburg,' he said, 'gave me occasion of becoming more nearly acquainted with that strange, erratic, comet-like spirit, marked by genius, but a Neapolitan, whose life was but a fiery fragment.'' A fiery fragment, literally consumed in fire at last. Not the less characteristic of that unparalleled era of intellectual renascence in Italy, which commenced in classicism, was closed by Jesuitism; which was cradled in the Platonic academy founded at Florence by the first illustrious chiefs of the Medicean line, and was entombed in the Holy Office instituted at Rome by Pope Paul III.; which had for its first martyr of modern philosophy Giordano Bruno, for its second Galileo. The character and career of Giordano Bruno furnish the most signal example of all that was irregular and anarchical in that immense intellectual as well as æsthetic movement, the transitory glory of the sixteenth century in Italy. The character and career of Galileo exemplify all that was genuinely scientific, and really religious in that movement. We should be disposed to regard the unbridled license on all subjects which so singularly and strangely distinguished Bruno as a natural reaction, on the one hand, against the complete self-prostration of intellect dogmatically demanded by the Church of Rome, and, on the other, as a natural 1 Memoirs of Baron Bunsen, vol. ii. p. 254. |