ing
the crowd of half-declared enemies who were seeking to undermine his
reputation, he set about, after his return to Florence, his greatest
literary and most popular work, _Dialogues on the Ptolemaic and
Copernican Systems_. This purports to be a series of four conversations
between three characters: Salviati, a Copernican philosopher; Sagredo, a
wit and scholar, not specially learned, but keen and critical, and who
lightens the talk with chaff; Simplicio, an Aristotelian philosopher,
who propounds the stock absurdities which served instead of arguments to
the majority of men.

The conversations are something between Plato's _Dialogues_ and Sir
Arthur Helps's _Friends in Council_. The whole is conducted with great
good temper and fairness; and, discreetly enough, no definite conclusion
is arrived at, the whole being left in abeyance as if for a fifth and
decisive dialogue, which, however, was never written, and perhaps was
only intended in case the reception was favourable.

The preface also sets forth that the object of the writer is to show
that the Roman edict forbidding the Copernican doctrine was not issued
in ignorance of the facts of the case, as had been maliciously reported,
and that he wishes to show how well and clearly it was all known
beforehand. So he says the dialogue on the Copernican side takes up the
question purely as a mathematical hypothesis or speculative figment, and
gives it every artificial advantage of which the theory is capable.

This piece of caution was insufficient to blind the eyes of the
Cardinals; for in it the arguments in favour of the earth's motion are
so cogent and unanswerable, and are so popularly stated, as to do more
in a few years to undermine the old system than all that he had written
and spoken before. He could not get it printed for two years after he
had written it, and then only got consent through a piece of
carelessness or laziness on the part of the ecclesiastical censor
through whose hands the manuscript passed--for which he was afterwards
dismissed.

However, it did appear, and was eagerly read; the more, perhaps, as the
Church at once sought to suppress it.

The Aristotelians were furious, and represented to the Pope that he
himself was the character intended by Simplicio, the philosopher whose
opinions get alternately refuted and ridiculed by the other two, till he
is reduced to an abject state of impotence.

The idea that Galileo had thus cast ridicule u