Arcetri, near Florence: but there, as
at Sienna, he was confined to his own premises, and strictly forbidden
to receive his friends. It is painful to contemplate the variety of
evils which overcast the evening of this great man's life. In addition
to a distressing chronic complaint, contracted in youth, he was now
suffering under a painful infirmity which by some is said to have been
produced by torture, applied in the prisons of the Inquisition to
extort a recantation. But the arguments brought forward to show that the
Inquisitors did resort to this extremity do not amount to anything like
direct proof. In April, 1634, Galileo's afflictions were increased by
the death of a favorite, intelligent, and attached daughter. He consoled
his solitude, and lightened the hours of sickness, by continuing the
observations which he was now forbidden to publish to the world; and the
last of his long train of discoveries was the phenomenon known by the
name of the moon's libration. In the course of 1636-37 he lost
successively the sight of both his eyes. He mentions this calamity in a
tone of pious submission, mingled with a not unpleasing pride. "Alas,
your dear friend and servant Galileo has become totally and irreparably
blind; so that this heaven, this earth, this universe, which with
wonderful observations I had enlarged a hundred thousand times beyond
the belief of by-gone ages, henceforward for me is shrunk into the
narrow space which I myself fill in it. So it pleases God: it shall
therefore please me also." In 1638 he obtained leave to visit Florence,
still under the same restrictions as to society; but at the end of a few
months he was remanded to Arcetri, which he never again quitted. From
that time, however, the strictness of his confinement was relaxed, and
he was allowed to receive the friends who crowded round him, as well as
the many distinguished foreigners who eagerly visited him. Among these
we must not forget Milton, whose poems contain several allusions to the
celestial wonders observed and published by the Tuscan astronomer.
Though blind and nearly deaf, Galileo retained to the last his
intellectual powers; and his friend and pupil, the celebrated
Torricelli, was employed in arranging his thoughts on the nature of
percussion, when he was attacked by his last illness. He died January 8,
1642, aged seventy-eight.

It was disputed whether, as a prisoner of the Inquisition, Galileo had a
right to burial in consecra