Order of Saint Dominic, had not been present at the mass--the daily
University red mass, De Spiritu Sancto, but said to-day according to
the proper course of the season in the chapel of the Sorbonne, with
much pomp, by the Italian Bishop of Paris. It was the reign of the
Italians just then, a doubly refined, somewhat morbid, somewhat ash-
coloured, Italy in France, more Italian still. What our Elisabethan
poets imagined about Italian culture--forcing all they knew of Italy
to an ideal of dainty sin such as had never actually existed there,--
that the court of Henry, so far as in it lay, realised in fact. Men
of Italian birth, "to the great suspicion of simple people," swarmed
in Paris, already "flightier, less constant, than the girouettes on
its steeples"; and it was love for Italian fashions that had brought
king and courtiers here this afternoon, with great eclat, as they
said, frizzed and starched, in the beautiful, minutely considered,
dress of the moment, pressing the learned University itself into the
background; for the promised speaker, about whom tongues had been
busy, not only in the Latin quarter, had [139] come from Italy. In
an age in which all things about which Parisians much cared must be
Italian, there might be a hearing for Italian philosophy. Courtiers
at least would understand Italian; and this speaker was rumoured to
possess in perfection all the curious arts of his native language.
And of all the kingly qualities of Henry's youth, the single one
which had held by him was that gift of eloquence he was able also to
value in others; an inherited gift perhaps, for amid all contemporary
and subsequent historic gossip about his mother, the two things
certain are, that the hands credited with so much mysterious ill-
doing were fine ones, and that she was an admirable speaker.

Bruno himself tells us, long after he had withdrawn himself from it,
that the monastic life promotes the freedom of the intellect by its