tence and abjuration were formally
promulgated, and ordered to be publicly read in the universities. In
Florence, the adherents of Galileo were ordered to attend in the Church
of Santa Croce to witness his disgrace. After a short imprisonment in
the jail of the Inquisition, he was ordered to Arcetri, and confined in
his own house. Here severe misfortunes awaited him; his favourite
daughter died; he fell into a state of melancholy; an application that
he might go to Florence for the sake of medical advice was refused. It
became evident that there was an intention to treat him with inexorable
severity. After five years of confinement, permission was reluctantly
accorded to him to remove to Florence for his health; but still he was
forbidden to leave his house, or receive his friends, or even to attend
mass during Passion Week without a special order. The Grand-duke tried
to abate this excessive severity, directing his ambassador at the court
of Rome to plead the venerable age and ill health of the immortal
convict, and that it was desirable to permit him to communicate certain
scientific discoveries he had made to some other person, such as Father
Castelli. Not even that was accorded unless the interview took place in
the presence of an official of the Inquisition. Soon after Galileo was
remanded to Arcetri. He spent the weary hours in composing his work on
Local Motion, his friends causing it to be surreptitiously published in
Holland. [Sidenote: The calamities of his old age.] His infirmities and
misfortunes now increased. In 1637 he became totally blind. In a letter
he plaintively says, referring to this calamity, "So it pleases God, it
shall therefore please me also." The exquisite refinement of
ecclesiastical vengeance pursued him remorselessly, and now gave him
permission to see his friends when sight was no longer possible. It was
at this period that an illustrious stranger, the author of "Paradise
Lost," visited him. Shortly after he became totally deaf; but to the
last he occupied himself with investigations respecting the force of
percussion. [Sidenote: His death; is refused burial.] He died, January,
1642, in the seventy-eighth year of his age, the prisoner of the
Inquisition. True to its instincts, that infernal institution followed
him beyond the grave, disputing his right to make a will, and denying
him burial in consecrated ground. The pope also prohibited his friends
from raising to him a monument in the chu