in the light of our civil war, seems divinely inspired, is
paralleled by some of Sarpi's utterances against the unmoral
tendencies of Jesuitism and Ultramontanism; and these too seem
divinely inspired as one reads them in the light of what has
happened since in Spain, in Sicily, in Naples, in Poland, in
Ireland, and in sundry South American republics.

The range of Sarpi's friendly relations was amazing. They
embraced statesmen, churchmen, scholars, scientific
investigators, diplomatists in every part of Europe, and among
these Galileo and Lord Bacon, Grotius and Mornay, Salmasius and
Casaubon, De Thou and Sir Henry Wotton, Bishop Bedell and
Vossius, with a great number of others of nearly equal rank.
Unfortunately the greater part of his correspondence has
perished. In the two small volumes collected by Polidori, and in
the small additional volume of letters to Simon Contarini,
Venetian Ambassador at Rome, unearthed a few years since in the
Venetian archives by Castellani, we have all that is known. It is
but a small fraction of his epistolary work, but it enables us to
form a clear opinion. The letters are well worthy of the man who
wrote the history of the Council of Trent and the protest of
Venice against the Interdict.

It is true that there has been derived from these letters, by his
open enemies on one side and his defenders of a rather sickly
conscientious sort on the other, one charge against him: this is
based on his famous declaration, "I utter falsehood never, but
the truth not to every one." ("La falsita non dico mai mai, ma la
verita non a ogniuno.")[1] Considering his vast responsibilities
as a statesman and the terrible dangers which beset him as a