r he admired so passionately. Only when
the old man died and his body was exposed in the church before burial,
did the neophyte of his philosophy approach the bier, and pray beside
it, and place poems upon the dead.

From this time forward Campanella became an object of suspicion to his
brethren. They perceived that the fire of the new philosophy burned in
his powerful nature with incalculable and explosive force. He moved
restlessly from place to place, learning and discussing, drawing men
towards him by the magnetism of a noble personality, and preaching his
new gospel with perilous audacity. His papers were seized at Bologna;
and at Rome the Holy Inquisition condemned him to perpetual
incarceration on the ground that he derived his science from the devil,
that he had written the book 'De tribus Impostoribus,' that he was a
follower of Democritus, and that his opposition to Aristotle savoured
of gross heresy. At the same time the Spanish Government of Naples
accused him of having set on foot a dangerous conspiracy for
overthrowing the vice-regal power and establishing a communistic
commonwealth in southern Italy. Though nothing was proved
satisfactorily against him, Campanella was held a prisoner under the
sentence which the Inquisition had pronounced upon him. He was, in
fact, a man too dangerous, too original in his opinions, and too bold
in their enunciation, to be at large. For twenty-five years he remained
in Neapolitan dungeons; three times during that period he was tortured
to the verge of dying; and at last he was released, while quite an old
man, at the urgent request of the French Court. Not many years after
his liberation Campanella died. The numerous philosophical works on
metaphysics, mathematics, politics, and aesthetics which Campanella
gave to the press, were composed during his long imprisonment. How they
came to be printed, I do not know; but it is obvious that he cannot
have been strictly debarred from writing by his jailors. In prison,
too, he made both friends and converts. We have seen that we owe the
publication of a portion of his poems to the visit of a German knight.

V.

The sonnets by Campanella translated in this volume might be rearranged
under four headings--Philosophical; Political; Prophetic; Personal. The
philosophical group throw light on Campanella's relation to his
predecessors and his antagonism to the pseudo-Aristotelian
scholasticism of the middle ages. They furthermore exp