ABSTRACT
Bruno must have been a marvel of intellectual industry. Interested in all things, burning to know, he must have put every spare moment at the monastery to good purpose; for his education was vast and varied. A good memory helped him; though sometimes one finds it, like the equally excellent memory of Macaulay, a trifle inaccurate; certainly he owed more to nature than to the systematized mnemonic art in which he believed. He spoke Spanish, 1 like all the cultivated people of the “Kingdom.” Latin, of course, was a living language, spoken by every educated monk and scholar. Bruno’s works give evidence of a wide range of reading in the Roman classics, and they contain many quotations from the Roman poets, especially from Lucretius, Virgil and Ovid. But his eager, romantic mind did not allow of being moulded by such studies into classic reserve and equipoise. He acquired an intimate acquaintance with the literature of that graceful, unlaboured daughter of Latin—his own tongue; that he commanded the great poets, Dante, Ariosto and Tasso, references and quotations in his works show; but he especially valued the sugared conceits and strained manner of Tansillo and the decadent Neapolitan school. The one play he wrote indicates the study of Bibbiena and Aretino no less than of Plautus and Terence.
