defiant of prosody, in the kind of erudition he professed to despise,
with here and there a shameless image,--the product not of formal
method, but of Neapolitan improvisation--was akin to the heady wine,
the sweet, coarse odours, of that fiery, volcanic soil, fertile in
such irregularities as manifest power. Helping himself indifferently
to all religions for rhetoric illustration, his preference was still
for that of the soil, the old pagan religion, and for the primitive
Italian gods, whose names and legends haunt his speech, as they do
the carved and pictorial work of that age of the Renaissance. To
excite, to surprise, to move men's minds, like the volcanic earth as
if in travail, and, according to the Socratic fancy, [157] to bring
them to the birth, was after all the proper function of the teacher,
however unusual it might seem in so ancient a university.
"Fantastic!"--from first to last, that was the descriptive epithet;
and the very word, carrying us to Shakespeare, reminds one how
characteristic of the age such habit was, and that it was pre-
eminently due to Italy. A man of books, he had yet so vivid a hold
on people and things, that the traits and tricks of the audience
seemed to strike from his memory all the graphic resources of his old
readings. He seemed to promise some greater matter than was then
actually exposed by him; to be himself enjoying the fulness of a
great outlook, the vague suggestion of which did but sustain the
curiosity of the listeners. And still, in hearing him speak you
seemed to see that subtle spiritual fire to which he testified
kindling from word to word. What Gaston then heard was, in truth,
the first fervid expression of all those contending views out of
which his written works would afterwards be compacted, of course with
much loss of heat in the process. Satyric or hybrid growths, things
due to hybris,+ insult, insolence, to what the old satyrs of fable
embodied,--the volcanic South is kindly prolific of these, and Bruno