plicius, the defender of Ptolemy. The brethren of Father Grassi and Father Scheiner,[1]—the latter of whom had been for a few months at Rome, and was greatly incensed at the "Dialogues,"—well knew how to lay hold of the Pope by his most vulnerable points, his personal vanity and boundless ambition, which made him feel every contradiction like an attack on his authority. They were assiduous in confirming Urban in his opinion that the Copernican doctrine endangered the dogmas of the Christian Catholic faith in the highest degree, and now represented that the publication of the "Dialogues" was an incalculable injury to the Church. Besides this, they persuaded the Pope that in his latest work Galileo had again, though this time under concealment, entered into theological interpretations of Holy Scripture. They thus stigmatised him as a rebel against the papal decrees, who had only obtained the licence from Riccardi by
- ↑ Scheiner had two years before published a work called "Rosa Ursina," in which he again fiercely attacked Galileo, and stoutly maintained his unjustifiable claims to the first discovery of the solar spots. Galileo did not directly answer him in his "Dialogues," but dealt him some side blows, and stood up for his own priority in the discovery with weighty arguments. Castelli, in a letter to Galileo of 19th June, 1632 (Op. ix. p. 274), gives an amusing description of Scheiner's rage. When a priest from Siena praised the book in his presence at a bookseller's, and called it the most important work that had ever appeared, Scheiner left the shop, pale as death, and trembling with excitement in every limb. But he did not always thus curb his rage. The natural philosopher, Torricelli, who afterwards became famous, a pupil of Castelli's, reported to Galileo, in a letter of 11th September, 1632 (Op. ix. p. 287), a conversation he had had with Scheiner about the "Dialogues." Although he shook his head about them, he had concurred in Torricelli's praise, but could not help remarking that he found the frequent digressions tedious; and no wonder, for they often referred to himself, and he always got the worst of it. He broke off the conversation by saying that "Galileo had behaved very badly to him, but he did not wish to speak of it." In a letter of 23rd February, 1633, to Gassendi (Op. ix. p. 275), Scheiner is less reserved. Rage and fury evidently guided his pen, and he complains bitterly that Galileo had dared in his work to "lay violent hands" on the "Rosa Ursina." Scheiner was doubtless one of the most zealous in instituting the trial against Galileo, although Targioni (vol. i. p. 113, note a) overshoots the mark in making him his actual accuser.
