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 of his story, he assured me that I had misunderstood him, that the elephant was directed to put his trunk under the wheel, and saw in a moment why. This is reasonable sagacity, and very likely the correct account; but I am quite sure that, in the fit of elephant-worship under which the story was first told, it was told as I have first stated it.]

I cannot imagine how I came to omit a writer whom I have known so many years, unless the following story will explain it. The officer reproved the boatswain for perpetual swearing; the boatswain answered that he heard the officers swear. 'Only in an emergency, said the officer. 'That's just it,' replied the other; 'a boatswain's life is a life of 'mergency.' Giordano Bruno was all paradox; and my mind was not alive to his paradoxes, just as my ears might have become dead to the boat-wain's oaths. He was, as has been said, a vorticist before Descartes, an optimist before Leibnitz, a Copernican before Galileo. It would be easy to collect a hundred strange opinions of his. He was born about 1550, and was roasted alive at Rome, February 17, 1600, for the maintenance and defence of the holy Chureh, and the rights and liberties of the same. These last words are from the writ of our own good James I., under which Leggatt was roasted at Smithfield, in March 1612; and if I hada copy of the mstrument under which Wightman was roasted at Litchfield, a month afterwards, I daresay I should find something quite as edifying. I extract an account which I gave of Bruno in the ''Comp. Alm.'' for 1855:—

He was first a Dominican priest, then a Calvinist; and was roasted alive at Rome, in 1600, for as many heresies of opimion, religious and philosophical, as ever lit one fire. Some defenders of the papal cause have at least worded their accusations so to be understood as imputing to him villainous actions, But it is positively certain that his death was due to opinions alone, and that retractation, even after sentence, would have saved him. There exists a remarkable letter, written from Rome on the very day of the murder, by Scioppius (the celebrated scholar, a waspish convert from Lutheranism, known by his hatred to Protestants and Jesuits) to Rittershusius, a well-known Lutheran writer on civil and canon law, whose works are in the index of prohibited books. This letter has been reprinted by Libri (vol. iv. p. 407). The writer informs his friend (whom he wished to convince that even a Lutheran would have burnt Bruno) that all Rome would tell him that