can.

wherever made. Both were wont to throw a light veil of humor over very serious discussions. Both could use, with great effect, curt, caustic description: Jefferson's letter to Governor Langdon satirizing the crowned heads of Europe, as he had seen them, has a worthy pendant in Fra Paolo's pictures of sundry representatives of the VatiIn both these writers was a deep earnestness which, at times, showed itself in prophetic utterances. The amazing prophecy of Jefferson against American slavery, beginning with the words, "I tremble when I remember that God is just," which, in the light of our civil war, seems divinely inspired, is paralleled by some of Sarpi's utterances against the unmoral tendencies of Jesuitism and Ultramontanism; and these too seem divinely inspired as one reads them in the light of what has happened since in Spain, in Sicily, in Naples, in Poland, in Ireland, and in sundry South American republics.

The range of Sarpi's friendly relations was amazing. They embraced statesmen, churchmen, scholars, scientific investigators, diplomatists in every part of Europe, and among these Galileo and Lord Bacon, Grotius and Mornay, Salmasius and Casaubon, De Thou and Sir Henry Wotton, Bishop Bedell and Vossius, with a great number of others of nearly equal rank. Unfortunately the greater part of his correspondence has perished. In the two small volumes collected by Polidori, and in the small additional volume of letters to Simon Contarini, Venetian Ambassador at Rome, unearthed a few years since in the Venetian archives by Castellani, we have all that is known. It is but a small fraction of his epistolary work, but it enables us to form a clear opinion. The letters are well worthy of the man who wrote the history of the Council of Trent and the

1 For this famous utterance, see notes of conversations given by Christoph, Burggraf von Dohna, in July, 1608, in Briefe und Acten zur

protest of Venice against the Interdict.

It is true that there has been derived from these letters, by his open enemies on one side and his defenders of a rather sickly conscientious sort on the other, one charge against him: this is based on his famous declaration, "I utter falsehood never, but the truth not to every one." ("La falsità non dico mai mai, ma la verità non a ogniuno.")1 Considering his vast responsibilities as a statesman and the terrible dangers which beset him as a theologian; that in the first of these capacities the least misstep might wreck the great cause which he supported, and that in the second such a misstep might easily bring him to the torture chamber and the stake, normally healthful minds will doubtless agree that the criticism upon these words is more Pharisaic than wholesome.

Sarpi was now spoken of, more than ever, both among friends and foes, as the "terribile frate." Terrible to the main enemies of Venice he indeed was, and the machinations of his opponents grew more and more serious. Efforts to assassinate him, to poison him, to discredit him, to lure him to Rome, or at least within reach of the Inquisition, became almost frantic; but all in vain. He still continued his quiet life at the monastery of Santa Fosca, publishing from time to time discussions of questions important for Venice and for Europe, working steadily in the public service until his last hours. In spite of his excommunication and of his friendships with many of the most earnest Protestants of Europe, he remained a son of the church in which he was born. His life was shaped in accordance with its general precepts, and every day he heard mass. So his career quietly ran on until, in 1623, he met death calmly, without fear, in full reliance upon the

Geschichte des Dreissigjährigen Krieges, München, 1874, p. 79.

His last

He

divine justice and mercy. words were a prayer for Venice. He had fought the good fight. had won it for Venice and for humanity. For all this, the Republic had, in his later years, tried to show her gratitude, and he had quietly and firmly refused the main gifts proposed to him. But now came a new outburst of grateful feeling. The Republic sent notice of his death to other powers of Europe through its Ambassadors in the terms usual at the death of royal personages; in every way, it showed its appreciation of his character and services, and it crowned all by voting him a public monument.

Hardly was the decree known, when the Vatican authorities sent notice that, should any monument be erected to Sarpi, they would anew and publicly declare him excommunicate as a heretic. At this, the Venetian Senate hesitated, waited, delayed. Whenever afterwards the idea of carrying out the decree for the monument was revived, there set in a storm of opposition from Rome. Hatred of the terrible friar's memory seemed to grow more and more bitter. Even rest in the grave was denied him. The church where he was buried having been demolished, the question arose as to the disposition of his bones. To bury them in sacred ground outside the old convent would arouse a storm of ecclesiastical hostility, with the certainty of their dispersion and desecration; it seemed impossible to secure them from priestly hatred: therefore it was that his friends took them from place to place, sometimes concealing them in the wall of a church here, sometimes beneath the pavement of a church there, and for a time keeping them in a simple wooden box at the Ducal Library. The place where his remains rested became, to most Venetians, unknown. All that remained to remind the world of his work was his portrait in the Ducal Library, showing the great gash made by the Vatican

assassins.

Time went on, and generations came which seemed to forget him. Still worse, generation after generation came, carefully trained by clerical teachers to misunderstand and hate him. But these teachers went too far; for, in 1771, nearly one hundred and fifty years after his death, the monk Vaerini gathered together, in a pretended biography, all the scurrilities which could be imagined, and endeavored to bury the memory of the great patriot beneath them. This was too much. The old Venetian spirit, which had so long lain dormant, now asserted itself: Vaerini was imprisoned and his book suppressed.

A quarter of a century later the Republic fell under the rule of Austria, and Austria's most time-honored agency in keeping down subject populations has always been the priesthood. Again Father Paul's memory was virtually proscribed, and in 1803 another desperate attempt was made to cover him with infamy. In that year appeared a book entitled The Secret History of the Life of Fra Paolo Sarpi, and it contained not only his pretended biography, but what claimed to be Sarpi's own letters and other documents showing him to be an adept in scoundrelism and hypocrisy. Its editor was the archpriest Ferrara of Mantua; but on the title-page appeared, as the name of its author, Fontanini, Archbishop of Ancira, a greatly respected prelate who had died nearly seventy years before, and there was also stamped, not only upon the preliminary, but upon the final page of the work, the approval of the Austrian government. To this was added a pious motto from St. Augustine, and the approval of Pius VII was distinctly implied, since the work was never placed upon the Index, and could not have been published at Venice, stamped as it was and registered with the privileges of the University, without the consent of the Vatican.

The memory of Father Paul seemed likely now to be overwhelmed. There was no longer a Republic of Venice to

guard the noble traditions of his life and service. The book was recommended and spread far and wide by preachers and confessors.

But at last came a day of judgment. The director of the Venetian archives discovered and had the courage to announce that the work was a pious fraud of the vilest type; that it was never written by Fontanini, but that it was simply made up out of the old scurrilous work of Vaerini, suppressed over thirty years before. As to the correspondence served up as supplementary to the biography, it was concocted from letters already published, with the addition of Jesuitical interpolations and of forgeries. Now came the inevitable reaction, and with it the inevitable increase of hatred for Austrian rule and the inevitable question, how, if the Pope is the infallible teacher of the world in all matters pertaining to faith and morals, could he virtually approve this book, and why did he not, by virtue of his divine inerrancy, detect the fraud and place its condemnation upon the Index. The only lasting effect of the book, then, was to revive the memory of Father Paul's great deeds and to arouse Venetian pride in them. The fearful scar on his face in the portrait spoke more eloquently than ever, and so it was that, early in the nineteenth century, many men of influence joined in proposing a suitable and final interment for the poor bones, which had seven times been buried and reburied, and which had so long been kept in the sordid box at the Ducal Library. The one fitting place of burial was the cemetery of San Michele. To that beautiful island, so near the heart of Venice, had, for many years, been borne the remains of leading Venetians. There, too, in more recent days, have been laid to rest many of other lands widely respected and beloved.

1 For a full and fair statement of the researches which exposed this pious fraud, see Castellani, Prefect of the Library of St. Mark, preface to his Lettere Inedite di F. P. S., p.

But the same persistent hatred which, in our own day, grudged and delayed due honors at the tombs of Copernicus and Galileo among Catholics, and of Humboldt among Protestants, was still bitter against the great Venetian scholar and statesman. It could not be forgotten that he had wrested from the Vatican the most terrible of its weapons. But patriotic pride was strong, and finally a compromise was made: it was arranged that Sarpi should be buried and honored at his burial as an eminent man of science, and that no word should be spoken of his main services to the Republic and to the world. On this condition he was buried with simple honors.

Soon, however, began another chapter of hatred. There came a pope who added personal to official hostility. Gregory XVI, who in his earlier days had been abbot of the monastery of San Michele, was indignant that the friar who had thwarted the papacy should lie buried in the convent which he himself had formerly ruled, and this feeling took shape, first, in violent speeches at Rome, and next, in brutal acts at Venice. The monks broke and removed the simple stone placed over the remains of Father Paul, and when it was replaced, they persisted in defacing and breaking it, and were only prevented from dragging out his bones, dishonoring them and casting them into the lagoon, by the weight of the massive, strong, well-anchored sarcophagus, which the wise foresight of his admirers had provided for them. At three different visits to Venice, the present writer sought the spot where they were laid, and in vain. At the second of these visits, he found the Patriarch of Venice, under whose rule various outrages upon Sarpi's memory had been perpetrated, pontificating gorgeously about the Grand Piazza; but at his next visit there had come a change.

xvii. For methods used in interpolating or modifying passages in Sarpi's writings, see Bianchi Giovini, Biografia di Sarpi, Zurigo, 1847, vol. ii. pp. 135, et seq.

The monks had disappeared. Their insults to the illustrious dead had been stopped by laws which expelled them from their convent, and there, little removed from each other in the vestibule and aisle of the great church, were the tombs of Father Paul and of the late Patriarch side by side; the great patriot's simple gravestone was now allowed to rest unbroken.

Better even than this was the reaction provoked by these outbursts of ecclesiastical hatred. It was felt, in Venice, throughout Italy, and indeed throughout the world, that the old decree for a monument should now be made good. The first steps were hesitating. First, a bust of Father Paul was placed among those of great Venetians in the court of the Ducal Palace; but the inscription upon it was timid and double-tongued. Another bust was placed on the Pincian Hill at Rome, among those of the most renowned sons of Italy. This was not enough: a suitable monument must be

erected. Yet it was delayed, timid men deprecating the hostility of the Roman Court. At last, under the new Italian monarchy, the patriotic movement became irresistible, and the same impulse which erected the splendid statue to Giordano Bruno on the Piazza dei Fiori at Rome, on the very spot where he was burned, - and which adorned it with the medallions of eight other martyrs to ecclesiastical hatred, erected in 1892, two hundred and seventy years after it had been decreed, a statue, hardly less imposing, to Paolo Sarpi, on the Piazza Santa Fosca at Venice, where he had been left for dead by the Vatican assassins. There it stands, noble and serene, a monument of patriotism and right reason, a worthy tribute to one who, among intellectual prostitutes and solemnly constituted impostors, stood forth as a true man, the greatest of his time, one of the greatest of all times, an honor to Venice, to Italy, and to humanity.

Andrew D. White.

John White Chadwick.

The voluminous literature of contemporary Greece does not concern us here; but the "bursting forth of genius from the dust" is brought home to us once more in the recovery of Timotheos. It is hardly six years since we were welcoming back a far sweeter singer in Bacchylides; yet few may remember how this new lead was opened well-nigh fifty years ago by the finding of Alkman's maiden-song, a song that admits us to the very dance of that Laconian herd of girls, with the radiant Hagesichora and Agido at their head. Since then every mummy-case is become a possible casket of hid treasure for the Hellenist, for even the embalmed crocodile is often wrapped in old Greek texts; and to such safekeeping we are already indebted for not a few precious works long lost to the world, among them considerable volumes of Aristotle, Bacchylides, and Herondas, and important fragments of Archilochos, Sappho, and Menander.

come from the same neighborhood, that of old Memphis; and each restores an else lost form of Greek melic, the parthenion, all the more precious because of Alkman's unchallenged mastery in that kind, and the nome in which Timotheos won his chief laurels.

This last recovery we owe to a German spade, as we owe its editio princeps to that prince of German humanists, von Wilamowitz-Möllendorf. While conducting excavations in February, 1902, at Abousir (ancient Busiris, a suburb of Memphis), Ludwig Borchardt struck an old Egyptian mummy-case tenanted (at second hand) by a stalwart Greek, whose well-kept anatomy shows once more how fully the Greeks in the Nile country had adopted Egyptian burial customs. From lesions in the skull it would seem that this strapping Greek had come to a violent end; and, indeed, he may have fought and fallen in that Egyptian campaign of Agesilaus and Chabrias (circa 358 B. C.). For his last long campaign in the undiscovered country, his outfit is slight enough, -chiefly, an empty leather purse, a pair of sandals, and a poet! Happily, in this instance, the poet had signed his work; and no sooner was the papyrus unrolled than it was seen to be the long lost PERSIANS of Timotheos, and that in a copy well-nigh old enough to have come from the author's own hand.1

A volume that Demosthenes and Aristotle might have thumbed must stir even

not to say fly-leaf, for our first column; and Wilamowitz judges from the text that more than half the whole poem is missing. Apparently, a stingy heir grudged our mummied Greek a full libretto; and, inasmuch as the roll always opened from the title-column, it is the first part (possibly including other pieces) that is lopped off, leaving us, luckily, the poet's seal and signature.