206 THE WORLD MACHINE 



went to the stake Galileo was thirty-six, and not two hundred 

 miles away. When he went the second time to Rome, it had 

 been but eight years since Archbishop Antonio de Dominis, 

 philosopher and man of science, known to us as the explainer 

 of the rainbow, had been sentenced to the same fate : "to be 

 handed over to the secular arm to be dealt with as mercifully 

 as possible without the shedding of blood " so the hideous 

 formula ran a sentence that was carried out upon his lifeless 

 body and writings after his death in the dungeons where he 

 had languished six years. It had been but three years when, 

 at Toulouse, these same vicars of Christ had cut the tongue 

 from the living Vanini and given his body to the flames. 



Ah, yes ! he recanted ; the miserable abjuration was signed. 

 The greatest mind in Europe went home a prisoner. Friendly 

 offices saved him from the papal dungeons. He was kept im- 

 prisoned in his own house. The degradation, the ordeal, perhaps 

 the torture, broke his splendid spirit. He had been a sufferer 

 almost all his life from a racking malady ; his beloved daughter 

 died ; then darkness came. " Alas," he writes sadly, in one of 

 his letters, " your dear friend and servant is totally blind. 

 Henceforth this heaven, this universe, which by wonderful ob- 

 servations I had enlarged a hundred and a thousand times 

 beyond the conceptions of former days, is shrunk for me into 

 the narrow space which I myself fill in it. So it pleases God, 

 so therefore shall it please me." 



Still he labours on. His disciples were allowed to gather 

 round him Torricelli, Castelli, Viviani ; their devotion helped 

 to lighten the heavy burden of his years. He is allowed an 

 amanuensis, and then it is that he gathers together the fruits 

 of his long studies in mechanics, and dictates the most enduring 

 of his works, the Dialogues on Two New Sciences. It appears 

 in 1638. He is then seventy-four years old. 



But the relentless vengeance of his persecutors never ceased ; 

 they tried to stop the publication of his last great work. They 

 did delay it for some years. He was allowed visitors rarely. 

 One of them was young John Milton, doing his wander jdhre. 

 His visit to the wonderful blind old man must have impressed 

 him profoundly. It must have come back to him strangely 

 when he too, in the living darkness of his old age, sat down 

 to dictate his masterpiece. You see it reflected in some of 

 the finest passages of Paradise Lost. 



