This excellent and accomplished person was one of those who do honour to
high birth and ample fortune, by employing them, not as the means of
selfish gratification or personal aggrandisement, but in the furtherance
of every useful pursuit, and every benevolent purpose. By the lover of
science he is honoured as one of the first and most successful
cultivators of experimental philosophy; to the Christian his memory is
endeared, as that of one, who, in the most licentious period of English
history, showed a rare example of religion and virtue in exalted
station, and was an early and zealous promoter of the diffusion of the
Scriptures in foreign lands.
Robert Boyle was the youngest son but one of a statesman eminent in the
successive reigns of Elizabeth, and the first James and Charles; and
well known in Ireland by the honourable title of the Great Earl of Cork.
He has left an unfinished sketch of his own early life, in which he
assumes the name of Philaretus, a lover of virtue; and speaks of his
childhood as characterized by two things, a more than usual inclination
to study, and a rigid observance of truth in all things. He was born in
Ireland, January 25, 1626–7. In his ninth year he was sent, with his
elder brother Francis, to Eton, where he spent between three and four
years: in the early part of which, under the guidance of an able and
judicious tutor, he made great progress both in the acquisition of
knowledge, and in forming habits of accurate and diligent inquiry. But
his studies were interrupted by a severe ague; and while recovering from
that disorder he contracted a habit of desultory reading, which it
afterwards cost him some pains to conquer by a laborious course of
mathematical calculations. During his abode at Eton several remarkable
escapes from imminent peril occurred to him, upon which, in after-life,
he looked back with reverential gratitude, and with the full conviction
that the direct hand of an overruling providence was to be traced in
them.
[Illustration:
_Engraved by R. Woodman._