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Updated: June 13, 2025
Visit to America; torrid heat at Washington; new revelation of President McKinley's qualities; his discussion of public affairs. Two-hundredth anniversary of the Prussian kingdom, celebration; my official speech; religious ceremonies; gala opera; remark upon it by the French ambassador. A personal bereavement. Vacation studies on Fra Paolo Sarpi.
I cannot well say how it was we came upon the old Servite Convent, which I had often looked for in vain, and which, associated with the great name of Paolo Sarpi, is to me one of the most memorable places in Venice.
So far as the life- long presence and the death of a man of clear brain and true heart could hallow any scene, this ground was holy; for here Sarpi lived, and here in his cell he died, a simple Servite friar he who had caught the bolts of excommunication launched against the Republic from Rome, and broken them in his hand, who had breathed upon the mighty arm of the temporal power, and withered it to the juiceless stock it now remains.
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. 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.
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.
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.
This compromise was that his bones, which had so long been kept in the ducal library to protect them from clerical hatred, might be buried in the church on the island, provided Sarpi were, during the ceremonies, honored simply as the discoverer of the circulation of the blood, which he probably was not, and not honored as the greatest statesman of Venice which he certainly was.
This, as I then supposed, closed the subject; but in the afternoon a servant came over, bringing me from Lord Acton a most interesting collection of original manuscripts relating to Sarpi, a large part of them being the correspondence between the papal authorities and the Venetians who had wished to give Sarpi's bones decent burial, over half a century before.
The famous disputes between that republic and the Pope are worth your knowledge; and the writings of the celebrated and learned Fra Paolo di Sarpi, upon that occasion, worth your reading.
It is not fair to the clergymen to have it known he wrote them. Twiss's Eldon, iii. 286. Johnson, we may be sure, had no copy of any of his sermons. That none of them should be known but those he wrote for Taylor is strange. Croker maintains in a note on this passage. I believe he was speaking of his translation of Courayer's Life of Paul Sarpi. Ante, i. 135.
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