nothing else but the 'gale' (i.e. 'the singer,' as in 'nightingale'), the piping wind, which sets all things dancing, and wafts away on its wings the souls of the little ones. His pied or variegated garment, like Odin's flecked coat,' may image the interchange of cloud and light, or the dappled appearance of a windy sky, just as in Sanskrit, kitrá, many-coloured-which gives us our word 'chintz'— is applied to the clouds. The same in essential characteristics is the Erlik-khan, who wears a dark mask and a gaily chequered robe, who wields a death-dealing sceptre, the surrogate of the golden wand of Yama his prototype, and causes men to vanish out of the land of the living. We might also note the analogies presented by the Maruts, the personified storm-gods of the Vedas, who, equipped with spears (thunderbolts) and glittering ornaments (lightnings), drive along their horses (the clouds), which are spotted or piebald (príshati). As pipers and dancers they make the music of the storm, and they hurry away the souls of the dying.*

Finally, it may be noted that, all the world over, the whirling wind, especially when it renders itself manifest by the cloud of dust or sand or straws which it raises in its rapid course, has been mythologised into a demon or evil spirit. Thus, in Akkadian, 'lil,' the ghost, with its shadowy substance, is given as a name to the dustcloud; and it was in such a dust-whirl that the soul of Eabani, in the epic of Gilgamesh, mounted up to heaven.† Sir Richard Burton speaks of pillars of dust and 'devils' of sand sweeping like giants over the desert. These ' phantoms of the plain,' as the traveller, Bruce, calls them, are found as Shaitan (Satan) in the Soudan; to the Arabs they are evil Jinns, to the Hindus they are Bhuts or malicious spirits careering at large. Whirlwinds,' says Burton, the anatomist of melancholy, are caused by aerial devils'; and he quotes an old writer, Cicogna, as saying that they manifest themselves in these revolving

M. Müller, Rig Veda,' i, 59, 76; 'Physical Religion,' 318; 'Contributions to Mythology,' pp. 604, 605. Compare, 'One man asked me whether I thought the souls of the collier-crews who had gone down were out in the storm' (Dickens, 'David Copperfield,' ch. 55).

† Sayce, 'Hibbert Lectures,' 145, 365; Maspero, ‘Life in Ancient Egypt and Assyria,' 250; Boscawen, 'The Bible and the Monuments,' 151.

Lane, Modern Egyptians,' ii, 37; Hughes, Dict. of Islam,' 134;

H. Spencer, 'Principles of Sociology,' i, 784.

winds when they raise the dust like a column. This belief is shared by the Danakil savages, the Afars, and Russian peasants, who pursue the eddies of dust and stab at them with their swords or attack them with hatchets. The moujiks believe that the dust-storms are moved and inhabited by vampires or witches. The modern Greeks hold that the actuating power of the whirlwind is the Nereid; the Chinese say it is a dragon, Tin-mi-lûng; the Russians, a demon, Vikhar; the Germans, the old heathen god, Zio, or the dancing Herodias; the Lower Saxons, the devil, Stepke. The Poles believe the dusty whirl to be a dance of fairies, which agrees with the Irish name, sheegaoithe' (sidheann-gaoithe), 'the fairy wind.' 'God speed you, gentlemen,' an Irishman will say to the 'good people' (sheeogues) as they ride by in a cloud of dust. And so in English fairy-lore Puck says:

'We own ourselves a pinch of lively dust

To frisk upon a wind.'

In the wind-god, shrouded in his mask of invisibility, wearing sometimes a blue mantle with golden spangles,' as was the case with Wodan, wielding a rod of magic potency that causes things to vanish away and transports the souls of mortals to the under-world; in Yama and Aerlik-khan, in Hellekin and Herlikin, in the Pied Piper and the Erlking, which share in all these characteristic features to a greater or less degree; and in the eddying whirlwind, which is so widely held to be an 'afrit,' demon, or tricksy spirit gliding across the plain-in all these we recognise the elements out of which our dancing harlequin, with his black visor, his motley coat, his thaumaturgic sword and graceful circumvolutions, has been evolved in the lapse of time after many strange transformations. It is indeed a far cry from Aerlik-khan, the grim Pluto of Tibetan superstition, and Yama, the dread impersonation of death in ancient India, to the lively figurant of our Christmas pantomime; and yet the two long-divorced ideas were once before brought together again by an obscure French dramatist, Thomas S. Gueulette, who, probably wiser than he himself knew, entitled a comedy which he produced at Paris in 1719, Arlequin-Pluto.'

Art. VI. GIORDANO BRUNO IN ENGLAND.

1. Spaccio della Bestia Trionfante, or The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast. Translated from the Italian of

Jordano Bruno Nolano. London, 1713.

2. Le opere italiane di Giordano Bruno. Ristampate da Paolo de Lagarde. Göttingen, 1888.

3. Life of Giordano Bruno the Nolan. By I. Frith. Revised by Prof. Moriz Carriere. London: Trübner, 1887. 4. Le opere latine di Giordano Bruno esposte e confrontate con le italiane, da Felice Tocco. Firenze, 1889.

5. Giordano Bruno und Shakespeare. Von Dr Robert Beyersdorff. Oldenburg, 1889.

6. The Poems and Masque of Thomas Carew. Edited by J. W. Ebsworth. London: Reeves and Turner, 1893. 7. The Italian Renaissance in England. By Lewis Einstein. New York: Macmillan Company, 1902.

'THE prophetic soul of the wide world dreaming on things to come'-these words, in Shakespeare's occultest sonnet, have been read sometimes as a stray from the theories of Giordano Bruno. At least they might serve to denote Bruno himself, with his poetical presentiment of modern pantheism and of a modern ethical temper. One of the divining and expressive minds of the Renaissance, full of its clashing elements of ideal aspiration and animal will, he remains, with his vision on distant things, rather solitary in its midst. The Italian books, which are his main bequest, were written, and probably printed, in England. But much as Bruno has been studied, especially since his monument rose on the place of his burning in Rome, the chapter of his visit to England and his dealings with the English world of his own day claim fresh attention, as well as the strange silence of our own records concerning him, the possible traces of his presence in Spenser and Shakespeare, and the fitful appearances of his name or influence in our literature during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

Bruno was in England about two years and a half, like a man waiting in harbour amidst a series of violent voyages, enjoying a peace which to him could only be comparative. He came, not more than thirty-five years

old, with a passionate intellectual experience already behind him. In the shade of the Dominican life at Naples he had read freely, and the irritant, original quality of his thought had soon brought adventures. He had clashed with the Church, had been threatened, and had put off the religious habit and fled. Thus he started on his long unquiet pilgrimage as a propagandist, joining the assailants of Aristotle and those of the old astronomy, and adding theological heresies of his own. He could not rest in the city of Calvin, which would only harbour a convert, though, luckily for Bruno, Calvin was dead. Then he lectured boldly in Toulouse, one of the homes of the Inquisition, and next, to the credit of Henry III, found shelter and a reader's rostrum in Paris. Here he spoke and wrote much, in the sense of the neoPlatonists, on the 'Shadows of Ideas,' or the deceiving shows of sense. These, to him, were faint copies of the eternal realities or Ideas, which in turn emanated from the supreme Idea of all. In the spring, probably, of 1583, he quitted Paris 'because of the disturbances,' bringing letters from Henry to his ambassador in London.

Michel de Castelnau de Mauvissière, a diplomatist of honour and address, had held his post, and the favour of Elizabeth, for nine years, despite his devotion to Mary Stuart. His memoirs, written in London, but ending with the year 1570, show glimpses of philosophic thought which have been held to recall that of Bruno. He was indeed an appointed guardian for such a visitor. Old cuts are to be seen of the low-hung and narrowwindowed mansion in Butcher Row, leading from Wych Street to the Strand, with the fleur-de-lis on its outer walls, and then or later called Beaumont House. The region is now cleared to purge the thoroughfares of London. Here probably were written four or five of the most explosive books of the sixteenth century. Bruno lived as the ambassador's gentleman,' under the roof of a staunch Roman Catholic, and safe by privilege from the arm of any Church. His inconvenient estate as an unfrocked priest was made easy by a special exemption from mass. During his whole stay he did not go to mass when it was said indoors, or out of doors, nor yet to any sermon.'

6

Bruno lived on close and happy terms with his host,

who 'welcomed him with such largesse to a notable position in his household,' and who earns all the more credit if he can scarcely have known that he entertained the chief thinker that had come to England since Erasmus. For Bruno such generosity 'turned England into Italy, and London into Nola.' One of his recondite works, called the 'Exposition of the Thirty Seals '-which is not a commentary on the Apocalypse-Bruno seems to have had printed in London soon after his arrival, and to have prefaced with a dedication to Castelnau by way of grateful afterthought. To the same protector he inscribed three of his far more notable Italian books written in London, using terms of a passionate gratitude which rings true through the pile of superlatives. Hatred and calumny are the lot of ruthless reforming philosophers; and Bruno abounds with plaints against the ignorant tale-bearers and caitiffs who assailed him. From all such Castelnau, who heaped one good office on another, was his only rock of defence. Elsewhere Bruno sounds the note of that superlative pride which saves his excessive arrogance from our ridicule and carried his unpacified spirit through to martyrdom. He caught the higher style of that age in his words to the ambassador:

In having near you one who is truly worthy of your protection and aid you show yourself, as ever, conformable to princes great of soul, and to the gods and heroes who have appointed you and those like you to be guardians of their friends. . . . For while your betters in fortune can do nothing for you, who exceed them in virtue, you can do for others something which shall straightway be written in the book of eternity, whether that which is seen upon earth or that which is supposed in heaven.'

Another passage begins by loading the female sex, in Bruno's way, with thirty-nine distinct epithets of abuse, the lightest of which are 'frailty' and 'imperfection,' and which are also quaintly contrived to fit his other aversion, the first matter' of Aristotle; but he ends, by way of exception, with a compliment-so sudden and vehement are the turns of his tongue!-to the wife and child of Castelnau. His hostess is endowed, he says carefully, with 'no mediocre bodily beauty,' and with courtesy and discretion. Maria, though only six, might, for her speech,