to do so. So far he was well within the bounds of orthodoxy; it was in
connection with the Devil that he professed peculiar opinions. He held
the Devil to be wicked, but not absolutely wicked, and considered that
the fiend's innate imperfection must always bar him from attaining to
the perfection of evil. He believed he discerned some symptoms of
goodness in the obscure manifestations of Satan's activity, and without
venturing to put it in so many words, augured from these the final
redemption of the pensive Archangel after the consummation of the ages.

These little eccentricities of thought and temperament, which had
separated him from the rest of the world and thrown him back upon a
solitary existence, afforded me amusement. He had wits enough; all he
lacked was common sense and appreciation of ordinary everyday things.
His life was divided between phantoms of the past and dreams of the
future; the actual present was utterly foreign to his notions. For his
political ideas, these came simultaneously from antique Santa Maria
degli Angeli and the revolutionary secret societies of London, and were
a combination of Christian and socialist. But he was no fanatic; his
contempt for human reason was too complete for him to attach great
importance to his own share in it. The government of states appeared to
him in the light of a huge practical joke, at which he would laugh
quietly and composedly, as a man of taste should. Judges, civil and
criminal, caused him surprise, while he looked on the military classes
in a spirit of philosophical toleration.

I was not long in discovering some flagrant contradictions in his mental
attitude. He longed with all the charity of his gentle heart for the
reign of universal peace. Yet at the same time he had a _penchant_ for
civil war, and held in high esteem that Farinata degli Uberti, who loved
his native Florence so boldly and so well that he constrained her by