Page:Galileo Galilei and the Roman Curia (IA cu31924012301754).pdf/63



fame, especially through his telescopic discoveries, and partly also through the exertions of his noisy opponents, had long extended beyond the narrow bounds of Italy, and the eyes of all central Europe were directed to the great astronomer. Numbers of pupils flocked to him from all countries, so that no lecture room in Padua was large enough to hold them. There were some distinguished personages among them, such as the Archduke Ferdinand of Austria, the Landgrave Philip of Hesse, the princes of Alsace, Mantua, etc., who mostly came to attend the lectures of the versatile master on fortification. It is, however, another fable of over zealous biographers to state that even Gustavus Adolphus, the hero of the thirty years' war, went to school for some months to Galileo.

This close occupation, with lectures and private lessons of all kinds, took him too much away from his own studies, and after twenty years' professorship Galileo longed for a post in which he could prosecute his own researches, and devote himself to the completion of his works, free from academic