an account of his observations of the Galaxy
and expresses his satisfaction that he has been enabled to terminate an
ancient controversy by demonstrating to the senses the stellar structure
of the Milky Way. When engaged in exploring the celestial regions with
his telescope, Galileo observed a marked difference in the appearance of
the fixed stars, as compared with that of the planets. Each of the
latter showed a rounded disc resembling that of a small moon, but the
stars exhibited no disc, and shone as vivid sparkling points of light;
all of them, whether of large or small magnitude, presenting the same
appearance in the telescope. This led him to conclude that the fixed
stars were not illumined by the Sun, because their brilliancy in all
their changes of position remained unaltered. But, in the case of the
planets, he found that their lustre varied according to their distance
from the Sun; consequently, he believed they were opaque bodies which
reflected the solar rays. On directing his telescope to the Pleiades,
which, to the naked eye, appear as a group of seven stars, he succeeded
in counting forty lucid points. The nebula Praesepe in Cancer, he was
also able to resolve into a cluster of stars. Galileo made many other
observations of the heavenly bodies with his telescope, all of which he
describes as having afforded him 'incredible delight.'

Shortly before the failure of his eyesight, Galileo discovered the
Moon's diurnal libration, a variation in the visible edges of the Moon
caused by its oscillatory motion, and the diurnal rotation of the Earth
on her axis.

Though Milton has not favoured us with any interesting details of his
interview with Galileo, nor expressed his opinions with regard to the
controversies which at that time agitated both the religious and
scientific worlds of thought, and which eventually culminated in a storm
of rancour and hatred that burst over the devoted head of the aged
astronomer, and brought him to his knees, yet he informs us that he
'found and visited' Galileo, whom he describes as 'grown old,' and
cynically remarks that he 'was held a prisoner of the Inquisition for
thinking in astronomy otherwise than the Franciscan and Dominican
licensers thought.' Milton does not allude to his blindness, and yet it
would be natural to imagine that, had his host suffered from this
affliction at the time of his visit, he would have referred to it. We
learn that Milton arrived in Italy in the