with the Italian literati should have been the means of preserving one
of their own compositions, the "Tina" of Antonio Malatesti, a series of
fifty sonnets on a mistress, sent to him in manuscript by the author,
with a dedication to the _illustrissimo signore et padrone
osservatissimo_. The pieces were not of a kind to be approved by the
laureate of chastity, and annoyance at the implied slur upon his morals
may account for his omission of Malatesti from the list of his Italian
acquaintance. He carried the MS. home, nevertheless, and a copy of it,
finding its way back to Italy in the eighteenth century, restored
Malatesti's fifty indiscretions to the Italian Parnassus. That his
intercourse with men of culture involved freedom of another sort we
learn from himself. "I have sate among their learned men," he says, "and
been counted happy to be born in such a place of philosophic freedom as
they supposed England was, while they themselves did nothing but bemoan
the servile condition into which learning amongst them was brought, that
this was it which had damped the glory of Italian wits; that nothing had
been written there now these many years but flattery and fustian." Italy
had never acquiesced in her degradation, though for a century and a half
to come she could only protest in such conventicles as those frequented
by Milton.

The very type and emblem of the free spirit of Italy, crushed but not
conquered, then inhabited Florence in the person of "the starry
Galileo," lately released from confinement at Arcetri, and allowed to
dwell in the city under such severe restraint of the Inquisition that no
Protestant should have been able to gain access to him. It may not have
been until Milton's second visit in March, 1639, when Galileo had
returned to his villa, that the English stranger stood unseen before
him. The meeting between the two great blind men of their century is one
of the most picturesque in history; it would have been more pathetic