of Clorinda, the pastoral of Aminta and Silvia—­episodes which created the music and the painting of two centuries, and which still live upon the lips of the people.  But inasmuch as his genius labored beneath the superincumbent weight of precedents and deferences, the poet’s nature was strained to the uttermost and his nervous elasticity was overtaxed.  No sooner had he poured forth freely what flowed freely from his soul, than he returned on it with scrupulous analysis.  The product of his spirit stood before him as a thing to be submitted to opinion, as a substance subject to the test of all those pedantries and fears.  We cannot wonder that the subsequent conflict perplexed his reason and sterilized his creative faculty to such an extent that he spent the second half of his life in attempting to undo the great work of his prime.  The Gerusalemme Conquistata and the Sette Giornate are thus the splendid triumph achieved by the feebler over the stronger portions of his nature, the golden tribute paid by his genius to the evil genius of the age controlling him.  He was a poet who, had he lived in the days of Ariosto, would have created in all senses spontaneously, producing works of Virgilian beauty and divine melancholy to match the Homeric beauty and the divine irony of his great peer.  But this was not to be.  The spirit of the times which governed his education, with which he was not revolutionary enough to break, which he strove as a critic to assimilate and as a social being to obey, destroyed his independence, perplexed his judgment, and impaired his nervous energy.  His best work was consequently of unequal value; pure and base metal mingled in its composition.  His worst was a barren and lifeless failure.

CHAPTER IX.

GIORDANO BRUNO.

Scientific Bias of the Italians checked by Catholic Revival—­Boyhood of Bruno—­Enters Order of S. Dominic at Naples—­Early Accusations of Heresy—­Escapes to Rome—­Teaches the Sphere at Noli—­Visits Venice—­At Geneva—­At Toulouse—­At Paris—­His Intercourse with Henri III.—­Visits England—­The French Ambassador in London—­Oxford—­Bruno’s Literary Work in England—­Returns to Paris—­Journeys into Germany—­Wittenberg, Helmstaedt, Frankfort—­Invitation to Venice from Giovanni Mocenigo—­His Life in Venice—­Mocenigo denounces him to the Inquisition—­His Trial at Venice—­Removal to Rome—­Death by Burning in 1600—­Bruno’s Relation to the Thought of his Age and to the Thought of Modern Europe—­Outlines of his Philosophy.

The humanistic and artistic impulses of the Renaissance were at the point of exhaustion in Italy.  Scholarship declined; the passion for antiquity expired.  All those forms of literature which Boccaccio initiated—­comedy, romance, the idyl, the lyric and the novel—­had been worked out by a succession of great writers.  It became clear that the nation was not destined to create tragic or heroic types of poetry.  Architecture,