A letter from Galileo's Venetian friend Micanzio, dated about a month later, is in rather a bolder and less formal style:—"The efforts of your enemies to get your book prohibited will occasion no loss either to your reputation, or to the intelligent part of the world. As to posterity, this is just one of the surest ways to hand the book down to them. But what a wretched set this must be to whom every good thing, and all that is founded in nature, necessarily appears hostile and odious! The world is not restricted to a single corner; you will see the book printed in more places and languages than one; and just for this reason, I wish they would prohibit all good books. My disgust arises from seeing myself deprived of what I most desire of this sort, I mean your other dialogues; and if, from this cause, I fail in having the pleasure of seeing them, I shall devote to a hundred thousand devils these unnatural and godless hypocrites." At the same time, Thomas Campanella, a monk, who had already distinguished himself by an apology for Galileo (published in 1622), wrote to him from Rome:—"I learn with the greatest disgust, that a congregation of angry theologians is forming to condemn your Dialogues, and that no single member of it has any knowledge of mathematics, or familiarity with abstruse speculations. I should advise you to procure a request from the Grand Duke that, among the Dominicans and Jesuits and Theatins, and secular priests whom they are putting on this congregation against your book, they should admit also Castelli and myself." It appears, from subsequent letters both from Campanella and Castelli, that the required letter was procured and sent to Rome, but it was not thought prudent to irritate the opposite party by a request which it was then clearly seen would have been made in vain. Not only were these friends of Galileo not admitted to the congregation, but, upon some pretext, Castelli was even sent away from Rome, as if Galileo's enemies desired to have as few enlightened witnesses as possible of their proceedings; and on the contrary, Scipio Chiaramonte, who had been long known for one of the staunchest and most bigoted defenders of the old system, and who, as Montucla says, seems to have spent a long life in nothing but retarding, as far as he was able, the progress of discovery, was summoned from Pisa to complete their number. From this period we have a tolerably continuous account of the proceedings against Galileo in the dispatches which Nicolini sent regularly to his court. It appears from them that Nicolini had several interviews with the Pope, whom he found highly incensed against Galileo, and in one of the earliest he received an intimation to advise the Duke "not to engage himself in this matter as he had done in the other business of Alidosi,[82] because he would not get through it with honour." Finding Urban in this humour, Nicolini thought it best to temporize, and to avoid the appearance of