be true."

The recent appointment of the Abbe Castelli, the friend and pupil of
Galileo, to be mathematician to the Pope, was an event of a most
gratifying nature; and when we recollect that it was to Castelli that
he addressed the famous letter which was pronounced heretical by the
Inquisition, we must regard it also as an event indicative of a new and
favourable feeling towards the friends of science. The opinions of
Urban, indeed, had suffered no change. He was one of the few Cardinals
who had opposed the inquisitorial decree of 1616, and his subsequent
demeanour was in every respect conformable to the liberality of his
early views. The sincerity of his conduct was still further evinced by
the grant of a pension of one hundred crowns to Galileo, a few years
after his visit to Rome; though there is reason to think that this
allowance was not regularly paid.

The death of Cosmo, whose liberality had given him both affluence and
leisure, threatened Galileo with pecuniary difficulties. He had been
involved in a "great load of debt," owing to the circumstances of his
brother's family; and, in order to relieve himself, he had requested
Castelli to dispose of the pension of his son Vincenzo. In addition to
this calamity he was now alarmed at the prospect of losing his salary as
an extraordinary professor at Pisa. The great youth of Ferdinand, who
was scarcely of age, induced Galileo's enemies, in 1629, to raise
doubts respecting the payment of a salary to a professor who neither
resided nor lectured in the university; but the question was decided in
his favour, and we have no doubt that the decision was facilitated by
the friendly recommendation of the Pope, to which we have already
referred.

Although Galileo had made a narrow escape from the grasp of the
Inquisition, yet he was never sufficiently sensible of the lenity which
he experienced. When he left Rome in 1616, under the solemn pledge of
never again teaching the obnoxious doctrine, it was with a hostility
against the church, suppressed but deeply cherished; and his resolution
to propagate the heresy seems to have been coeval with the vow by which
he renounced it. In the year 1618, when he communicated his theory of
the tides to the Archduke Leopold, he alludes in the most sarcastic
manner to the conduct of the church. The same hostile tone, more or
less, pervaded all his writings, and, while he laboured to sharpen the
edge of his satire, he endeavoured to guard