honour, however, gave Kepler no satisfaction--it rather occasioned
him dismay, especially as it deprived him of all pecuniary benefit, and
made it almost impossible for him to get a publisher to undertake
another book.

Still he worked on at the Rudolphine tables of Tycho, and ultimately,
with some small help from Vienna, completed them; but he could not get
the means to print them. He applied to the Court till he was sick of
applying: they lay idle four years. At last he determined to pay for the
type himself. What he paid it with, God knows, but he did pay it, and he
did bring out the tables, and so was faithful to the behest of his
friend.

This great publication marks an era in astronomy. They were the first
really accurate tables which navigators ever possessed; they were the
precursors of our present _Nautical Almanack_.

After this, the Grand Duke of Tuscany sent Kepler a golden chain, which
is interesting inasmuch as it must really have come from Galileo, who
was in high favour at the Italian Court at this time.

Once more Kepler made a determined attempt to get his arrears of salary
paid, and rescue himself and family from their bitter poverty. He
travelled to Prague on purpose, attended the imperial meeting, and
pleaded his own cause, but it was all fruitless; and exhausted by the
journey, weakened by over-study, and disheartened by the failure, he
caught a fever, and died in his fifty-ninth year. His body was buried at
Ratisbon, and a century ago a proposal was made to erect a marble
monument to his memory, but nothing was done. It matters little one way
or the other whether Germany, having almost refused him bread during his
life, should, a century and a half after his death, offer him a stone.

[Illustration: FIG. 34.--Portrait of Kepler, older.]

The contiguity of the lives of Kepler and Tycho furnishes a moral too
obvious to need pointing out. What Kepler might have achieved had he
been relieved of those ghastly struggles for subsistence one cannot
tell, but this much is clear, that had Tycho been subjected to the same
misfortune, instead of being born rich and being assisted by generous
and enlightened patrons, he could have accomplished very little. His
instruments, his observatory--the tools by which he did his work--would
have been impossible for him. Frederick and Sophia of Denmark, and
Rudolph of Bohemia, are therefore to be remembered as co-workers with
him.

Kepler, with his ill-health an