For the rest, so long as he was left to pursue his studies in tranquillity, Sarpi had happiness enough; and his modesty was so great that he did not even seek to publish the results of his discoveries in science.

For this reason they have now been lost to the world; only the memory of them surviving in the notes of Foscarini and Grisellini, who inspected his MSS.

before they were accidentally destroyed by fire in 1769.
Though renowned through Europe as the _orbis terrae ocellus_, the man sought out by every visitor to Venice as the rarest citizen of the Republic, Sarpi might have quitted this earthly scene with only the faint fame of a thinker whose eminent gifts blossomed in obscurity, had it not been for a public opportunity which forced him to forsake his studies and his cell for a place at the Council-board and for the functions of a polemical writer.

That robust manliness of mind, which makes an Englishman hail English virtues in Sarpi, led him to affirm that 'every man of excellence is bound to pay attention to politics.'[131] Yet politics were not his special sphere.

Up to the age of fifty-four he ripened in the assiduous studies of which I have made mention, in the discharge of his official duties as a friar, and his religious duties as a priest.