For a little while, we are informed, he was allowed to remain secluded in the palace of his friend Nicolini. In a few months, however, he was removed to an apartment in the Exchequer of the Inquisition, still being permitted the attendance of his own servant, and many indulgences of which they had not decided to deprive him. On the twenty-first of June, of the same year, he appeared before the Holy Office. Through its gloomy halls and passages he passed to the tribunal. There was little here, as in the other ecclesiastical buildings of Rome, to captivate the senses. The dark walls were unadorned with the creations of art; state and ceremony were the gloomy ushers to the chamber of intolerance. In silence and in mystery commenced the preparations. The familiars of the office advanced to the astronomer, and arrayed him in the penitential garment; and as he approached, with a slow and measured step, the tribunal, cardinals, and prelates noiselessly assembled, and a dark circle of officers and priests closed in, while, as if conscious that the battle had commenced in earnest between mind and power, all the pomp and splendor of the hierarchy of Rome--that system which had hitherto possessed a sway unlimited over the fears and opinions of mankind--was summoned up to increase the solemnity and significance of the judgment about to be pronounced against him. To the tedious succession of technical proceedings, mocking justice by their very assumption of formality, it would be needless to refer. Solemnly, however, and by an authority which it was fatal to resist, Galileo was called on to renounce a truth which his whole life had been consecrated to reveal and to maintain, "The motion through space of the Earth and Planets round the Sun." Then, immediately, assuming he had nothing to allege, would attempt no resistance, and offer no defense, came the sentence of the tribunal, banning and anathematizing all who held the doctrine, that the sun is the centre of the system, as a tenet "philosophically false, and formally heretical." And then they sentenced the old and infirm philosopher--this band of infallibles!--they bade him abjure and detest the said errors and heresies. They decreed his book to the flames, and they condemned him for life to the dungeons of the Inquisition, bidding him recite, "once a week, seven penitential psalms for the good of his soul!" Did Galileo yield? Did he renounce that theory now affording such ample proof of the beauty and order of the universe; to whose very laws Kepler, the friend and contemporary of the philosopher, was even then, though unconsciously, bearing evidence, by his wonderful theorem of velocities and distances, a problem which Newton afterward confirmed and illustrated?