the incident cannot have occurred on this occasion, as it is quite certain that Valkendorf did not attend the Prince on his visit to Hveen. During the summer of 1592 Tycho had a number of other visitors, among them Prince Vilhelm of Courland, a brother to the Duke.[1]
But though Tycho's position still seemed an excellent one, and he continued in the undisturbed possession of all his sources of income, he seems about this time to have become dissatisfied and annoyed by various circumstances. In the letter to the Landgrave in 1591 in which he described the state of Denmark,[2] he remarked that there were certain unpleasant obstacles which hindered him from carrying out successfully all that he had planned for the restoration of astronomy, but he hoped to get rid of these and other obstacles in some way or other, and any soil was a country to the brave, and the heavens were everywhere overhead. These last words ("omne solum forti patria est cœlum undique supra est") are very similar to some which he had used six years before in the poetical letter to Kaas, and they seem to indicate that already at this time he was not unfamiliar with the idea of seeking a home outside Denmark, if circumstances should make the stay at Hveen unpleasant to him. Among his causes of annoyance was a quarrel with one of the tenants on the estate of the Roskilde prebend, which does not place Tycho in a very favourable light, and which may, perhaps, account for the coldness shown by the governor of the Prince when the visit to Hveen was proposed. It appears that Tycho and the tenant, Rasmus Pedersen, had had some difference in the
- ↑ Tycho calls him in the diary Vilihelmus, Dux Curlandiæ et Semigalliæ (i.e., Semgallen or Samogitia, the south-east part of Courland), but he was not a Duke, and never became one. He probably visited Denmark to endeavour to enlist the sympathy of that country for Courland, which had a difficult position between Russia and Sweden.
- ↑ Epist., p. 198, last line. The letter is dated Cal. Augusti, which should be Cal. Aprilis, as may be seen from the Landgrave's answer.
