From the court Galileo was conducted to prison, to be immured for life in one of the dungeons of the Inquisition. His sentence was afterwards mitigated, and he was permitted to return to Florence; but the humiliation to which he had been subjected pressed heavily on his spirits, beset as he was with infirmities, and totally blind, and he never more talked or wrote on the subject of astronomy. There was enough in the character of Galileo to command a high admiration. There was much, also, in his sufferings in the cause of science, to excite the deepest sympathy, and even compassion. He is moreover universally represented to have been a man of great equanimity, and of a noble and generous disposition. No scientific character of the age, or perhaps of any age, forms a structure of finer proportions, or wears in a higher degree the grace of symmetry. Still, we cannot approve of his employing artifice in the promulgation of truth; and we are compelled to lament that his lofty spirit bowed in the final conflict. How far, therefore, he sinks below the dignity of the Christian martyr! "At the age of seventy," says Dr. Brewster, in his life of Sir Isaac Newton, "on his bended knees, and with his right hand resting on the Holy Evangelists, did this patriarch of science avow his present and past belief in the dogmas of the Romish Church, abandon as false and heretical the doctrine of the earth's motion and of the sun's immobility, and pledge himself to denounce to the Inquisition any other person who was even suspected of heresy. He abjured, cursed, and detested, those eternal and immutable truths which the Almighty had permitted him to be the first to establish. Had Galileo but added the courage of the martyr to the wisdom of the sage; had he carried the glance of his indignant eye round the circle of his judges; had he lifted his hands to heaven, and called the living God to witness the truth and immutability of his opinions; the bigotry of his enemies would have been disarmed, and science would have enjoyed a memorable triumph." LETTER XXIII. SATURN.--URANUS.--ASTEROIDS. "Into the Heaven of Heavens I have presumed, An earthly guest, and drawn empyreal air."--_Milton._ THE consideration of the system of Jupiter and his satellites led us to review the interesting history of Galileo, who first, by means of the telescope, disclosed the knowledge of that system to the world. I will now proceed with the other superior planets.