Court and Jesuitry, Rome had to be attacked in Italy.  His reasoning was correct.  But peoples fighting for freedom on their native soil could not risk an adventure which only some central power of the first magnitude like France might have conducted with fair prospect of success.  In the meantime what Sarpi called the Diacatholicon, that absolutist alliance of Rome, Spain and Austria, supported by the Inquisition and the Jesuits, accepted by the states of Italy and firmly rooted in some parts of Germany, invaded even those provinces where the traditions of independence still survived.  After 1610 the Jesuits obtained possession of France; and though they did not effect their re-entrance into Venice, the ruling classes of the Republic allowed themselves to be drugged by the prevalent narcotic.  Venice, too, was fighting for her life in the Adriatic and the Levant, while her nobles became daily more supine in aristocratic leisure, more papalizing in their private sympathies.  Thus the last years of Sarpi’s life were overclouded by a deep discouragement, which did not, indeed, extinguish his trust in the divine Providence or his certain belief that the right would ultimately prevail, but which adds a tragic interest to the old age of this champion of political and moral liberty fallen on evil days.

I have thought it well to preface what I have to say about Sarpi with this forecast of his final attitude.  As the Italian who most clearly comprehended the full consequences of the Catholic Revival, and who practically resisted what was evil for his nation in that reactionary movement, he demands a prominent place in this book.  On his claims to scientific discoveries and his special service rendered to the Venetian Republic it will suffice to touch but lightly.

Sarpi’s father was short of stature, brown-complexioned, choleric and restless.  His mother was tall, pale, lymphatic, devoted to religious exercises and austerities.  The son of their ill-assorted wedlock inherited something of both temperaments.  In his face and eyes he resembled his mother; and he derived from her the piety which marked his course through life.  His short, spare person, his vivid, ever-active intellect testified to the paternal impress.  This blending of two diverse strains produced in him a singular tenacity of fiber.  Man’s tenement of clay has rarely lodged a spirit so passionless, so fine, so nearly disembodied.  Of extreme physical tenuity, but gifted with inexhaustible mental energy, indefatigable in study, limitless in capacity for acquiring and retaining knowledge, he accentuated the type which nature gave him by the sustained habits of a lifetime.  In diet he abstained from flesh and abhorred wine.  His habitual weaknesses were those of one who subdues the body to mental government.  As costive as Scaliger,[127] Sarpi suffered from hepatic hemorrhage, retention of urine, prolapsus recti, and hemorrhoids.  Intermittent fevers reduced his strength, but rarely