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 still if Galileo could have known that his name would be written in "Paradise Lost," or Milton could have foreseen that within thirteen years he too would see only with the inner eye, but that the calamity which disabled the astronomer would restore inspiration to the poet.

How deeply he was impressed appears, not merely from the famous comparison of Satan's shield to the moon enlarged in "the Tuscan artist's optic glass," but by the ventilation in the fourth and eighth books of "Paradise Lost," of the points at issue between Ptolemy and Copernicus:-- "Whether the sun predominant in heaven Rise on the earth, or earth rise on the sun, He from the east his flaming road begin, Or she from west her silent course advance With inoffensive pace, that spinning sleeps On her soft axle, while she paces even, And bears thee soft with the smooth air along." It would be interesting to know if Milton's Florentine acquaintance included that romantic adventurer, Robert Dudley, strange prototype of Shelley in face and fortune, whom Lord Herbert of Cherbury and Dean Bargrave encountered at Florence, but whom Milton does not mention.