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abstruse discovery” that is revealed unto friends, and unto friends only. He mourns for the dead Etienne de la Boëtie, in accents of wild grief and inconsolable love. The learned Hubert Languet, the friend of Melanchthon and of the leaders of the reformed church, tells the young Philip Sidney how he kept his portrait by him some hours to feast his eyes upon it, and how his appetite was “rather increased than diminished by the sight,” and Sidney writes to him, “the chief hope of my life, next to the everlasting blessedness of heaven, will always be the enjoyment of true friendship, and there you shall have the chiefest place.” Later on there came to Sidney's house in London, one—some day to be burned at Rome, for the sin of seeing God in all things—Giordano Bruno, just fresh from his triumph before the University of Paris. “A filosofia é necessario amore” were the words ever upon his lips, and there was something in his strange ardent personality that made men feel that he had discovered the new secret of life. Ben Jonson writing to one of his friends subscribes himself “your true lover,” and dedicates his noble eulogy on Shakespeare “To