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 that had held by him was that gift of
eloquence, which he was able also to value in others--inherited
perhaps; for in all the 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Bruno himself tells us, long after he had withdrawn himself from it,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
[235] silence and self-concentration. The prospect of such freedom
sufficiently explains why a young man who, however well found in
worldly and personal advantages, was conscious above all of great
intellectual possessions, and of fastidious spirit also, with a
remarkable distaste for the vulgar, should have espoused poverty,
chastity, obedience, in a Dominican cloister. What liberty of mind
may really come to in such places, what daring new departures it may
suggest to the strictly monastic temper, is exemplified by the
dubious and dangerous mysticism of men like John of Parma and Joachim
of Flora, reputed author of the new "Everlasting Gospel," strange
dreamers, in a world of sanctified rhetoric, of that later
dispensation of the spirit, in which all law must have passed away;
or again by a recognised tendency in the great rival Order of St.
Francis, in the so-called "spiritual" Franciscans, to understand the
dogmatic words of faith with a difference.