But not in this view alone do we see little to inspirit him in the ardent pursuit of mechanical employments, another and more serious obstacle arose from his belonging, like his father and ancestors, to the Roman Catholic faith. The laws against Papists were inconsistently stringent in England on religious grounds; and strange to say, in imperial Rome, the very seat of the papacy, absurdly severe denunciations were pronounced against even the free discussion of scientific subjects. On the memorable 22nd of June, 1633, Galileo, prosecuted by the Inquisition at Rome, was compelled to abjure his astronomical theories and discoveries as heretical! The inquiry with its results must have deeply interested Lord Herbert; but what could he hope to gain even from his own party, as the inventor of a “semi-omnipotent engine?” Thus situated he was surrounded by circumstances nowise calculated to stimulate his mental activity in the peculiar occupations that employed his leisure and his fortune; but the fact offers an invaluable proof of the intense satisfaction an inquiring mind always experiences in the realization of its mental speculations. There is every reason to believe that his studies were completed, his tastes fixed, his experiments pretty well matured at this period, and that it was, therefore, the occasion of stamping his future character. He was then terminating his “golden days,” to enter upon a very different career. While, therefore, most anxious to avoid every appearance of substituting fictions for facts, we feel impelled to indulge in an attempt to account for his long serious devotion to employments so apparently foreign to either his education, his station in life, or the necessities of the times; while, indeed, on the other hand, all operated against him, owing to the darkness, ignorance, persecution and prevailing prejudices of the age. It appears from his published work that Lord Herbert was better versed in mathematical than in classical literature. His mental activity may have been promoted by physical causes, assuming that from delicacy of constitution he may have been thereby disposed to those studious habits, to which he was ever after so much attached; the Vandyck portrait of him in his youth would indicate that he was not constituted for undergoing much severity of exercise in the fatiguing sports and pastimes then in vogue.