taking shelter under the claim of a divinely-revealed authority. This
claim demolished, the stagnant current of human progress will soon burst
its barriers and set with a mighty rush toward the wide ocean of truth
and freedom..."

That general belief in the perfectibility of man which cheered the
eighteenth-century thinkers in their struggle for intellectual liberty
coloured with a delightful brightness this vision of a renewed humanity.
It threw its beams on every branch of research, and shone like an
aureole round those who laid down fortune and advancement to purchase
the new redemption of mankind. Foremost among these, as Odo now learned,
were many of his own countrymen. In his talks with Vivaldi he first
explored the course of Italian thought and heard the names of the great
jurists, Vico and Gravina, and of his own contemporaries, Filangieri,
Verri and Beccaria. Vivaldi lent him Beccaria's famous volume and
several numbers of the "Caffe," the brilliant gazette which Verri and
his associates were then publishing in Milan, and in which all the
questions of the day, theological, economic and literary, were discussed
with a freedom possible only under the lenient Austrian rule.

"Ah," Vivaldi cried, "Milan is indeed the home of the free spirit, and
were I not persuaded that a man's first duty is to improve the condition
of his own city and state, I should long ago have left this unhappy
kingdom; indeed I sometimes fancy I may yet serve my own people better
by proclaiming the truth openly at a distance than by whispering it in
their midst."

It was a surprise to Odo to learn that the new ideas had already taken
such hold in Italy, and that some of the foremost thinkers on scientific
and economic subjects were among his own countrymen. Like all