death, but longing for it, like another Cato. O man worthy of eternal remembrance among men! If he held beliefs contrary to the rules of the Church I do not praise him, but I admire his learning, his knowledge of so many things, his eloquence, and the subtlety of his answers." In the midst of that turbulent and noisy crowd, his eloquence was so great that Poggio evidently thinks he would have been acquitted had he not courted death.[1]
His address was a most skilful vindication, gliding with seemingly careless negligence over the dangerous spots in his career—for his whole life had been made the subject of indictment—and giving most plausible explanations of that which could not be suppressed, as though the Bohemian troubles had been solely due to political differences. As for his recantation, his judges had promised him kindly treatment if he would throw himself on the mercy of the council. He was but a man, with a human dread of a dreadful death by fire; he had weakly yielded to persuasion, he had abjured, he had written to Bohemia as required, he had condemned the teaching of John Huss. Here he rose to the full height of his manly and self-devoted eloquence. Huss was a just and holy man, to whom he would cleave to the last; no sin that he had ever committed so weighed upon his conscience as his cowardly abjuration, which now he solemnly revoked. Wickliff had written with a profounder truth than any man before him, and dread of the stake alone could have induced him to condemn such a master, saving only the doctrine on the sacrament, of which he could not approve. Then he burst forth into a ringing invective on the vices of the clergy, and especially of the Roman curia, which had stimulated Wickliff and Huss to their efforts for reform. The good fathers of the council might be stunned for a moment by the fierce self-sacrifice of the man who thus deliberately threw away his life, but they soon recovered themselves, and quietly assigned the following Saturday for his definite sentence. Although, as a self-confessed relapsed, he was entitled to no further consideration, they proposed, with unusual mercy, to give him four days to reconsider and repent, but he had been addressing an audience far beyond the narrow walls of the Cathedral of Constance, and his words were seeds which sprouted forth in armed warriors.[2]
On May 30 the final acts of the tragedy were hurried through;
