“At last, as a true Catholic, I was obliged to retract my opinion and by way of penalty my Dialogue was prohibited; and after five months I was dismissed from Rome. As the pestilence was then raging in Florence, with generous pity the house of the dearest friend I had in Sienna, Mgr. Archbishop Piccolomini, was appointed to be my prison; and in his most gentlemanly conversation I experienced so great delight and satisfaction that here I resumed my studies, arrived at and demonstrated most of my mechanical conclusions concerning the resistance of solids and some other speculations. “After about five months when the pestilence had ceased in my native place, in the beginning of December in the present year 1633, His Holiness permitted me to dwell within the narrow limits of that house I love so well, in the freedom of the open country. I therefore returned to the village of Bellosguardo and thence to Arcetri; where I still am breathing salubrious air, not far from my own dear Florence.” Galileo died in Florence, to which he was at last permitted to return, at the age of seventy-eight years. It is an interesting subject for speculation to conjecture what this great genius might have achieved if he had been born later and could have utilized all the appliances supplied by modern science. His personal character was that of a most delightful companion, a man of learning and deeply read, but no pedant. On the contrary, his humour was genial, his wit pungent, and he sometimes made enemies by his banter, as in the case of Urban VIII. The well known story of his whispered protest in private denial of the open admission wrung from him as to this movement of the earth is said to be apocryphal. But it was very likely that a man of his cheerful disposition would say _sotto voce_ “but it does move all the same.” Galileo was a devoted lover of art, passionately attached to music and poetry, and he was said to have known the works of Ariosto by heart. Gabriello Fiamma was bishop of Chioggia, near Venice, and a popular preacher throughout Italy. He narrowly escaped the Inquisition. When in Naples all his manuscripts and note books were seized, even to the last scrap in his possession, but nothing compromising was found to convict him, and it appeared that he had been betrayed by some envious and malevolent foe.