The commencement of the printing was again delayed till the beginning of May,[176] and then proceeded but slowly, for it was not until 27th May that Ciampoli sent the first two sheets of the “Saggiatore” to the author, in order to prove to him the falseness of a report which had meanwhile gained currency, that the printing of the work had been prohibited.[177]
An event then took place which seemed likely to produce a great change in Galileo’s relations with Rome; indeed in the whole attitude of ecclesiastical authority towards the free progress of science. At all events, as we shall see, Galileo flattered himself with this hope, and not without some justification. On 8th July, 1623, Gregory XV. succumbed to age and infirmity in the second year of his pontificate. The man who at the age of fifty-five was now elevated to the papacy, not only did not in the least resemble his immediate predecessors, but his tendencies were in striking contrast to theirs. He was previously Cardinal Maffeo Barberini, and now ascended the papal throne as Urban VIII.
His Character.—Taste for Letters.—Friendship for Galileo when Cardinal.—Letters to him.—Verses in his honour.—Publication of “Il Saggiatore,” with Dedication to the Pope.—Character of the Work.—The Pope’s approval of it.—Inconsistency with the assumed Prohibition.
Scarcely any Pope has left to posterity so accurate a delineation of his character and aims in his own trenchant utterances as Urban VIII. When shown the marble monuments of his predecessors, he proudly observed that he “would erect iron ones to himself.” And the fortress of Castelfranco on the Bolognese frontier (called, in honour of his Holiness, Fort Urbino), the new breastworks of the Castle of St. Angelo, the Vatican Library turned into an arsenal, the new manufactory of arms at Tivoli, and finally the costly harbour of Civita Vecchia, are so many silent testimonies to the cherished desire of this _pontiff_ to transform the eternal city into an inviolable symbol in stone of the temporal power of the Pope, and to accredit himself as a true mediæval vicegerent of Christ with the two-edged sword of the world. His athletic physique and iron energy were ever the vigorous executors of his ideas. In his self-sufficiency he disdained to take counsel with the Sacred College, saying that he “knew better than all the cardinals put together,” and boldly set himself above all ancient constitutions, alleging the unheard of reason that “the sentence of a living Pope was worth more than all the decrees of a hundred dead ones.” And finally, to leave his flock, the Christian peoples, in no manner of doubt about his pastoral humility, he revoked the resolve of the Romans never again to erect a monument to a Pope in his lifetime, saying, “such a resolution could not apply to a Pope like himself.”