Naples, was mysteriously warned in Genoa by a Franciscan. friar to open his eyes to the condition of Calabria.' In August, 1599, Carlo Spinelli, lieutenant-general of the pro-. vince, was despatched thither with an armed force, to exact a tremendous reckoning as well from the visionary as from the disaffected. Two thousand arrests are said to have been made, and several executions took place; if we are to believe what we read in the Narrative,' those only were safe who could afford to pay a good price for immunity. Campanella was seized as he was on the point of escaping to Sicily in company with his father. The boatman engaged to transport them across the strait demanded a gratuity somewhat larger than consisted with their slender resources, and the delay caused by this incident cost our philosopher a captivity of seven-andtwenty years in the dungeons of Naples. The peasant, in whose hut he sought shelter while his father went in search of a less exacting ferryman, conceived suspicions, and declared them to his master, Fabrizio Carafa, Principe della Roccella. Carafa sent the supposed conspirator bound to Carlo Spinelli. We would willingly spare our readers the remainder of this deplorable history, but the facts before us are inexorable, and require a notice, which we will strive to make as brief as possible.

Campanella and several other monks implicated with him, fearing to die 'inconsulto pontifice, jure belli,' as was at first threatened, repeatedly appealed from the civil to the ecclesiastical tribunals, and even feigned heresy, in order that their case might fall within the jurisdiction of the Holy Office. This singular device was successful as regards all save the chief offender. The Bishop of Termoli was sent down from Rome to enquire into and report upon the matter, and, finding how it stood, was prepared, in spite of the violent opposition of the civil authorities, to order the release of all the ecclesiastical prisoners. But before their liberation could be effected, he died (Heaven knows how!' exclaims Campanella), and the Spaniards were able to procure the nomination of a successor to him somewhat more condescending to their wishes. The final decision of the Congregation of Cardinals was to the effect that all the accused should be dismissed, with one exception. Tommaso Campanella, no cause being assigned, no crime imputed, was condemned to perpetual imprisonment, sine spe, in the prisons of this Holy Office.' There was, however, a dessous des cartes. The unhappy prisoner himself, who was all this time in secret communication with the Pontifical Court, assures us that this terrible sentence was passed merely as a

blind to the Spanish officials- ad ostentationem--and for the purpose of procuring his transference to Rome. Once there, he considered himself sure of pardon and favour, and the course of subsequent events confirmed his sanguine anticipations. But a great gulf of weary years had first to be crossed.

The Spaniards would neither relinquish their victim, nor bring him to trial. Every expedient of fiendish cruelty was tried in vain to induce him to confess to some crime less shadowy than that of having fallen a victim to an absurd and dangerous delusion. We read with horror that he was put to the torture seven times, his torments on one occasion extending over forty consecutive hours; that he was plunged in a foul subterranean dungeon without light, air, or wholesome food; and that he was dragged from one prison to another, until the very apprehension of change itself became intolerable suffering. Finally, being condemned to the galleys, his mind gave way, or seemed to give way. He assures us in the Narrative' that the delirium with which, during fifty days, his mind appeared to be clouded, was genuine madness; but this assertion, made for a purpose, fails to convince us, and we are inclined to attach greater weight to the covert allusions contained in the sonnet, 'Di se stesso,' to the expedients resorted to by the wise in all ages against the persecutions of the world. The lines

'Bruto e Solon furor finto coperse,

E Davide temendo il re Geteo,'

taken in connexion with the circumstances to which they avowedly refer, seem decisive in favour of simulation. The artifice (if artifice it was) produced at any rate its intended effect. He escaped the galleys, and the conditions of his imprisonment were, with the progress of time, gradually ameliorated. He was permitted to correspond and converse with some of the most eminent men of the time, whose friendship was secured by his misfortunes, his learning, and the singular and original charm of his personal intercourse. The greater part of his voluminous writings was composed during his long seclusion, the tedium of which was relieved by his growing conviction of its necessity for the successful accom; 'ishment of his life's work.

By Divine appointment,' he writes in the prefatory epistle to the Philosophia Realis,' I was detained in prison by the ⚫ ungrateful rulers of my country so long as sufficed for the restoration of all the sciences, which, under the guidance of Heaven, I had already conceived; but in vulgar prosperity, nor save in solitude, had certainly not availed to accomplish.

Thus, deprived of the material world, I gained admittance to the far more spacious world of thought, and learned at last to 'know the immense Archetype, which contains all things in the word of his power.' Elsewhere he adds the less exalted, but more pathetic words: Driven to write that I may not wholly die, I had yet rather be free and happy than thus at < work.'

The surviving poems of Campanella, supposed to be only a seventh part of those originally written by him, owe their preservation to a fortunate accident. A Saxon gentleman, named Tobias Adami, passing through Naples on his return from the Holy Land, visited the imprisoned philosopher, was attracted towards him as well by sympathy as by admiration, and devoted eight months to the uninterrupted enjoyment of his conversation. He is now remembered as the first editor of many of his friend's works. Under the quaint form of Settimontano Squilla,' Campanella's name appeared upon the titlepage of a selection from his Cantiche,' rudely printed in 1622, probably at Frankfort. The punning substitution of Squilla for Campanella' has its significance. This play of words is of constant recurrence in his writings, which in the earlier editions are adorned with the representation of a large bell, symbolical of the awakening effect of the treatise thus impressively presented to the public. The name 'Settimontano' contains an allusion to the seven protuberances for which the philosopher's skull-questa mia settimontanu testa,' he calls it in one of his madrigals-was remarkable.

6

In these poems we have a faithful, though necessarily incomplete, transcript of the phases through which the mind of the prisoner passed during the first twenty-one years of his incarceration. We do not hesitate to say that this little volume of rough-hewn verses, many of them jotted down by stealth in the intervals of extreme suffering, far outweighs in point of real, living interest, all the ponderous tomes of his collected works, solemnly bequeathed by him to posterity as the Bible of philosophy, the criterion of science, the citadel of sacred and profane knowledge.'* Campanella's mind operated by impulse rather than by reflection. The process of thinking not only occupied his reason, but excited his passions. It was impossible for him to separate himself from his thoughts sufficiently to criticise or control them. Instead of observing the current of his ideas from a safe elevation, whence he could take measures to modify its impetuosity or direct its course, he was

* Philosophia Universalis, Proem.

himself carried away by the flood, and swept helplessly into a morass of speculation, without sure standing-ground or safe outlet. It is our conviction that no great work was ever done in the world without a vast amount of deliberate hard thinking. Meditation is the necessary complement of inspiration. But with the philosophers of that time, the long labour of productive thought was a radiant but sterile rapture.* Their vision was not strong or keen enough to enable them to trace outlines or measure distances amid the dazzle of the new lights by which they were bewildered and delighted. Thus Campanella had surprising intuitions, but he was incapable of imparting to a train of abstract reasoning the steady coherence of logical sequence. For this reason, his improvised utterances are of a higher value than his finished productions. In attempting to develope his thoughts, he ordinarily succeeded only in diluting them. His poetical lucubrations and his formal treatises are based on the same extravagant assumptions. But the logical responsibility of an author is widely different in a sonnet or a song struck off in the glow of pseudo-prophetical inspiration, and in an elaborate system of physics and metaphysics, designed to be the corner-stone of knowledge for future ages. A sublime absurdity, which in the cold blood of the philosopher's argument revolts our common sense, exalts our imagination in the passionate strains of the poet.

Mr. Symonds has earned the gratitude of English readers by his meritorious translation of the sonnets of Michael Angelo and of Campanella, and we are indebted to the appearance of his volume for the opportunity of addressing ourselves to our present subject. The task which he set himself was one of extraordinary difficulty, and few critics will be found so fastidious as to find fault with the manner of its accomplishment. Those best capable of estimating the obstacles which lay in his path will be least likely to complain if some of the uncouth vigour and audacious felicity of the originals have disappeared in the laborious process of reducing them to the obedience of English versification. In truth, the best part of poetry must always be incommunicable by means of a translation. The subtle essence which forms the medium of communication between the minds of the writer and of the reader, evaporates at

A singular fragment attributed to Giordano Bruno, and published by Signor d'Ancona in the edition of Campanella's works cited at the head of this article, describes a method of attaining to a species of philosophical ecstasy, not very different from De Quincey's opium

trances.

the touch of a strange hand. There is no dealing so tenderly with this dainty flower, but that, transplanted to an alien soil, it becomes a drooping and scentless exotic. This is especially the case with Campanella's verses. They are profoundly characteristic. No other human being but himself could have written them; and he himself could have written them under no other circumstances than the singular and terrible ones under which they were actually composed. They were wrung from him by the throes of his anguish, and they were inspired to him by the ecstasies of his solitude. They reflect his illusions and his illuminations, his contrition and his confidence, his trepidations and his triumphs. They ring in our ears the 'Passionate outcry of a soul in pain; '

they dilate our spirits with the

• Exultations trampling on despair'

of a mystic or a martyr. They everywhere bear the stamp of a vast and noble mind, but of a mind unballasted, unpiloted, derelict of sober sense, and bound on no profitable voyage.

The language in which Campanella wrote the Cantiche' was not his native speech. The Tuscan of the Della Cruscan vocabulary was hardly more closely allied to the Calabrian dialect which formed the mother-tongue of his childhood, than is Portuguese to Spanish, or Dutch to German. In his hands, as in those of Alfieri, it was an unfamiliar and somewhat inflexible material, lending itself to strong forms more readily than to graceful decorations. Both writers were far removed from that fatal facility' of expression, which, by anticipating thought, enervates diction. They hewed out their phrases by the sheer force of their conceptions. Campanella's lost tragedy, Maria Stuarda,' was probably far inferior to that of Alfieri on the same subject. But

'Nil illi larvâ aut tragicis opus esse cothurnis.'

His lyrics are the chorus of a tragedy of which he is himself the protagonist. There is here no parade of the buskin, no display of melodramatic woe, after the manner of more modern poets; but we are thrilled by the contrast, tragic because unconscious, between the enthusiastic delusions of which he made the visionary food of his life, and the actual and poignant miseries which steeped his daily bread in bitterness.

As years went on, all the learned world of Europe became interested in his fate, nor were Popes and Kings indifferent to the sufferings of the captive of Sant' Elmo. There is reason to believe that he had established relations with a monarch so