HERMETIC THOUGHTS
“A Monarch may command my Life or Fortune but not my opinion: I
cannot command this myself; it arises only from the Nature of
the Thing I judge of.”—ROBERT BOYLE.
“... A general chemical council, not far from _Charing Cross_,
sits often, and hath so behaved itself hitherto, that things
seem now to hasten towards some settlement.... They are about
an universal laboratory, to be erected after such a manner as
may redound, not only to the good of this island, but also to
the health and wealth of all mankind.”—SAMUEL HARTLIB _to_
ROBERT BOYLE, _May 1654_.
Lord Broghill had laid aside his _Parthenissa_. The story goes that
in the autumn of 1649 he was meditating, under cover of a course of
treatment for the gout, a visit to Spa, which would take him into the
neighbourhood of the “royal orphan”; and one account, at least, of
how Cromwell intercepted Broghill in London is too picturesque to be
discarded.
Nobody—so runs the story—was in the secret of Broghill’s little plan
except his wife, Lady Pegg, and perhaps his sister Ranelagh, at whose
house, in the Old Mall, Broghill arrived on a certain day in the dusk,
with only four servants in attendance, to take leave of her before
setting out on his journey to Spa.
“My Lord came, and was no sooner housed but heard a voice ask for my Lord
Broghill: he thereupon charged his faithful sister with treachery; but
her protestation of being innocent tempered him.” The messenger proved
to be a “sightly Lieutenant,” sent by the Lord General to know when and
where he might interview Broghill; and, after a good deal of parleying,
a meeting was arranged for early next morning in St. James’s Garden.
Cromwell was there first, with a group of his officers about him, and
Broghill soon learnt that his correspondence with the “royal orphan” was
discovered, and that he must make his choice. “The dilemma is short,”
Cromwell is reported to have said; “if you go with me in this expedition
to reduce the Irish rebels, you may live, otherwise you certainly
die.”[169]
Whatever the details, the fact remains that Broghill accepted Cromwell’s
offer, and returned to Ireland with some sort of understanding that,
while he would serve Cromwell and the cause of Protestantism under the
Parliament, he was not to be required to fight against any but the
Irish.[170] Accordingly, in December 1649, “dear Broghill” was in Ireland
again, and Robert Boyle was writing to congratulate him on a brilliant
series of successes at Kinsale, Cork, Bandon and Youghal. “And truly that
which most endears your acquisitions to me is that they have cost you so
little blood.”[171] Cromwell had known his man; a veritable son of the
old soldier-statesman, whose name was alive yet in Munster. There could
have been no Rebellion in Ireland, said Cromwell, if every county had
contained an Earl of Cork.
Other members of the Boyle family were back in Ireland. The eldest
brother, Dungarvan, now Earl of Cork, the good-natured head of the
family, and his no less good-natured Countess were living at Lismore
or in Dublin. Frank and “black Betty,” as Robert Boyle had dubbed the
little sister-in-law, were living near Castle Lyons; and there also
was Lady Barrymore, whose “wild boy,” so lately Milton’s pupil in the
Barbican, was now a very young married man. To his mother’s discomfiture,
and sorely against her wishes, young Barrymore had married another of the
fascinating Killigrews; and the same batch of Irish letters that carried
Robert Boyle’s congratulations to Broghill took also a very wise letter,
written from London, to his eldest sister, Lady Barrymore.[172] He had
known nothing about the marriage till it was over.
“Without pretending to excuse or extenuate what is past, having minded
you that there is a difference betwixt seasonable and just, I shall
venture only to represent to you that the question is not now whether or
no the marriage be a thing fit to be done, but how it is to be suffered;
and that as the best gamesters have not the privilege of choosing their
own cards, but their skill consists in well playing the game that is
dealt them, so the discreetest persons are not allowed the choice of
conditions and events, but their wisdom consists in making the best of
those accidents that Providence is pleased to dispense them.” And he
reminds his sister that, as she has declared openly for the Royalist
party, the mediation of a “crowned intercessor” in this matter is not
to be disregarded. Moreover, some of her nearest friends, “though they
think the match very unhappy, think it unfit the married pair should be
so.”[173]
The letter heralds Robert Boyle’s own arrival in Ireland on a visit to
his sister at Castle Lyons, and to the various family homes in Munster.
His Irish estates were certainly calling for his attention; but the
visit was to be postponed. Broghill’s diplomatic victories were but the
beginning of bloody warfare. Broghill was to serve Cromwell through the
whole of the war with Ireland, in a series of brilliant engagements. “A’
Broghill! A’ Broghill!” was the battle-cry that led on his men; and he
narrowly escaped with his life in the last engagement of all—his victory
at Knockbrack. Broghill was the man aimed at. “Kill the fellow in the
gold-laced coat!” the Irish soldiers shouted to each other. But Broghill
was not killed, though “my boldest horse,” he wrote, “being twice
wounded, became so fearful that he was turned to the coach.”[174]
In the summer of 1650 Robert Boyle was still at Stalbridge, writing on
May Day to thank Hartlib for his gossip about _Utopia_ and _Breda_:[175]
“my inclinations as much concerning me in _Republicâ Literariâ_ as
my fortune can do in _Republicâ Anglicanâ_. Nor am I idle, though my
thoughts only are not at present useless to the advancement of learning;
for I can sometimes make shift to snatch from the importunity of my
affairs leisure to trace such plans and frame such models, etc., as,
if my Irish fortune will afford me quarries and woods to draw competent
materials from to construct after them, will fit me to build a pretty
house in Athens, where I may live to philosophy and Mr. Hartlib.”
At this time, Ireland and Athens were equally remote. Was there an
attraction, other than the Invisibles, that still kept Robert Boyle
within reach of London? Many years afterwards—after Robert Boyle was
dead—his old friend John Evelyn, writing about him to Dr. Wotton said:
“Tho’ amongst all his experiments he never made that of the maried life,
yet I have been told he courted a beautifull and ingenious daughter
of Carew,[176] Earl of Monmouth, to which is owing the birth of his
_Seraphick Love_.”
Was this, indeed, the love-story of Robert Boyle’s life? If so, it was
lived through between the years 1648 and 1650. As early as the cold
January of 1648, at Stalbridge, on the very day he came of age, in some
moment of depression or decision, the boy had made a little sacrifice
to Vulcan: he had resolutely burned most of the verses, “amorous,
merry and devout” that he had written in idle moments, and laid away
“uncommunicated.”[177] Then, when spring came, and the Stalbridge
orchards were white with blossom, he had set off on his visit to London,
and taken up his abode in those rooms in St. James’s that had been
engaged for him by his sister Ranelagh. Early in June, he was writing to
his friend Mrs. Hussey—presumably a Dorsetshire friend and neighbour—a
letter full of political gossip, written the very day after he had supped
with the ladies at Warwick House. But how does the letter end?
“But, Madam, since I began to write this letter, I had unexpectedly the
happiness of a long conversation with the fair lady, that people are
pleased to think my mistress; and truly, Madam, though I am as far from
being in love as most that are so are from being wise, yet my haste makes
me gladly embrace the old excuse of
‘Then to speak sense
Were an offence’
to extenuate my having hitherto written so dully, and my concluding
so abruptly; for whilst this amorous rapture does possess, I neither
could write sense without being injurious to my passion, nor can any
longer continue to write nonsense, without some violation of that
profound respect which is due to you from, and vowed you by, Madam, your
ladyship’s most faithful and most humble servant.”
If the fair lady who talked so delightfully, were indeed a “beautifull
and ingenious daughter” of the Earl of Monmouth, Robert Boyle’s
love-story goes into a nutshell. For just a month later came the Countess
of Monmouth’s letter to Lady Ranelagh, which so confounded the young
squire with its civilities, and contained the invitation to Moore Park.
The two young people had already met, and been attracted to one another:
the lady’s name had been already spoken of among their mutual friends as
that of a possible bride for the young Squire; Lady Ranelagh, at whose
house, it is probable, they had first met, and who was certainly anxious
to see Robyn with a wife of his own at Stalbridge, had been in private
conclave with Lady Monmouth; and the Countess herself, the mother of a
bevy of daughters, was disposed to look kindly on the young Squire, in
spite of his Geneva-bred philosophy, and his not very robust health.
For he was the youngest son of a very great family; cultured, amiable,
virtuous—and likely to be a moderately rich man, when once his Irish
affairs could be put in order. But there was the Earl of Monmouth to
deal with; a Churchman, and passionately Royalist. There is a sentence
in Robyn’s letter to the Countess which carries with it a suggestion
that she, rather than the Earl, was interested in the young suitor:
“If,” he says, of his precious manuscript, which she had asked him to
bring to Moore Park, “it have either any way diverted your Ladyship, _or
had the least influence upon my Lord_, I have reached my desires and
gone beyond my hopes.” Did the Earl of Monmouth look unfavourably upon
the young Puritan, or desire to extract from him promises—a statement
about his religious and political convictions—which Robert Boyle was
unwilling to make? And the fair lady herself—what amount of say had she
in the matter? If Robyn had joined the King’s Army would he have won
his _Hermione_?[178] In his _Seraphick Love_, he speaks of Hermione’s
“cold usage.” It is quite possible that this beautiful and ingenious
daughter of the Monmouth family may have merely looked shyly on Robert
Boyle, his manuscript treatises and his little valetudinary ways;
but it is also possible that, young as she was—she can scarcely have
been more than seventeen—she was a girl not only of strong hereditary
feelings, brought up a strict Churchwoman and Royalist, but of spirit and
conviction—a character as firm as Robert Boyle’s itself. _The Martyrdom
of Theodora and of Didymus_, Robert Boyle’s quaint and powerful prose
romance—of which only the second part was ever published, and that
not until 1687—was written in his early youth, and even more than his
_Seraphick Love_ seems as if it may hold the internal evidence of his
own love-story. If _Seraphick Love_ speaks of a woman’s “cold usage” the
story of Theodora and Didymus explains it. The character of Theodora is
worth studying, if this is indeed Robert Boyle’s ideal of womanhood.
It is the character of a woman young and beautiful, who is not only an
uncommonly good talker, but “declares her aversion for marriage.” Her
reasons are given to her friend Irene, who has “solicited favour for
Didymus.”
“Marriage,” says Theodora, “is one of the most important Things of Life;
and though I esteem it a mean Notion of Happiness to think that one
Person can make either of them the Portion of another, yet Discretion,
as well as Sincerity and Chastity, oblige a woman to have a great deal
of Care of that which concerns the Term of her Life; and a Woman that
designs to behave herself like a Wife, ought to take care in a Choice
she can make but once, and not carelessly to enter on a Voyage where
Shipwracks are so frequent, though she be offered a fine ship to make it
in. But since my dear _Irene_ takes this opportunity to know more of my
Thoughts than I should disclose to any other Person, I must tell her that
were I at my own disposal, and should be willing to make such a Change
as I have always been averse to, Didymus’s Virtues and Services would
influence me more than the Advantages of Titles, Riches or Dignities
of his Rivals could. But dear _Irene_, the times are such, and my
Circumstances too, that it would be very extravagant for me to engage
myself further in the World. For a Christian cannot think to be happy,
whilst the Church is miserable, and perplexed with outward Calamities....
When I think,” proceeds Theodora, “of the Church’s Desolation, and
that I should not only be content to be a Spectator, but an Actor in
the Tragedy, I cannot relish the Complements of a Lover, nor hope
for Contentment, except from a Place above the reach of Persecution.
And these Sentiments,” says she, “are warranted by the Apostle, who
Discouraged Women that were free, in much less troublesome times, from
entering into a Marriage State....”
* * * * *
And which of the bevy of Monmouth daughters was it that would not marry
Robert Boyle?—“a beautifull and ingenious daughter,” says Evelyn; that is
all that is known of her. Anne, the eldest, had in 1648 been some years
married to James Hamilton, Earl of Clanbrassil; and of the six other
daughters born to the Earl and Countess of Monmouth, only three seemed
to have reached maturity—Elizabeth, Mary and Martha—of whom Elizabeth
must have been seventeen in 1648. These three, with the Countess, his
widow, were left in the Earl’s will—dated July 1659—his co-heirs. They
were then all three unmarried; the Earl their father left some of the
property under certain conditions relating to their being, as he quaintly
expressed it, “in my life preferred in marriage or otherwise dead.” It
was not till some years after the Earl of Monmouth’s death that Mary and
Martha married—Mary becoming the second wife of the Earl of Desmond
and Martha the second wife of the Earl of Middleton. Elizabeth died
in December 1676, and was buried a few months before the Countess of
Monmouth, her mother, in Rickmansworth Church. The inscription on the
stone over her grave is not an ordinary one—
Sacred to the Memory
of yᵉ Right Honᵇˡᵉ yᵉ Lady Elizabeth
Cary one of yᵉ Davghters & Co-heirs
of the Right Honᵇˡᵉ Henry
Lord Cary Baron of Leppington
and Earle of Monmovth. Shee
dyed the 14ᵗʰ day of December in
the year of ovr Lord 1676 & in
the 46ᵗʰ year of her age having
livd all her time vnmarried bvt
now expecting A joyfvll Resvrrecᵗⁱᵒⁿ
and to be joynd to her onely
Spouse and Saviour Jesvs Christ,
lies here interd near the said
Earle her Father.
Was this the heroine of Boyle’s love story—the _Hermione_ whose “cold
usage” sent him to write his _Seraphick Love_ at Leeze?—the woman whose
views on a Marriage State found their way into his _Martyrdom of Theodora
and of Didymus_? It will probably never be known. Whoever the lady,
whatever the reason, the affair seems to have been, in modern parlance,
“off” before the end of 1648. And yet, a whole year later, in December
1649, Robert Boyle was in London again, scorching his wings at the flame.
“I know Frank will endeavour to persuade you,” he wrote to his sister
Barrymore, “that it is the thing called Love that keeps me here”; and
to Lord Broghill, at the same date, “My next shall give you an account
of my transactions, my studies, and my _amours_; of the latter of which
black Betty will tell you as many lies as circumstances; but hope you
know too well what she is and whence she comes not to take all her
stories for fictions....”
Some strong attraction, then, in or near London, there undoubtedly
was, and Robert Boyle’s family knew of it; but all their thrusts were
successfully parried in what Sir Henry Wotton had called Robyn’s “pretty
conceits.” In company Robert Boyle was to “prate” with “pure raillery” of
“matrimony and amours.” He was to pity those who “dote on red and white.”
He never could deplore the lover who “by losing his mistress recovers
himself.” He was to declare that he had “never known the infelicities
of love except by others’ sufferings”; to write exultantly about “this
untamed heart.” He had, he said, so seldom seen a happy marriage, that
he did not wonder “our Lawgivers should make marriage indesolvable to
make it lasting.” Marriage was “a Lottery, in which there are many blanks
to one prize.” And yet Robyn was as sensitive as he was proud. Not in
company which prated of “matrimony and amours,” he had his own ideal.
Love to him remained “the Noblest Passion of the Mind”; and at twenty-one
he acknowledged the existence of “a peculiar unrivaled sort of Love,
which constitutes the Conjugal Affections.” Lady Ranelagh, frustrated in
one attempt, might go on hoping. “If you are in the west,” she wrote at a
later date to this incorrigible brother, “let me beseech you to present
my humble service to my two Lady Bristols, and wish you would disappoint
Frank[179] by bringing a wife of your own to Stalbridge, a business I
must still mind you of, though you give me cause to doubt you will as
hardly pardon me those few words as the rest of the trouble given you
here by your K. R.”
But there was to be no other fair lady in Robyn’s letters or in Robyn’s
life—no lady whose conversational powers ever again produced in him
an “amorous rapture.” He returned to his “kind of Elysium,” and the
lethal chamber of chemical research. And when once a rumour reached
his relatives in Ireland that he was actually married, and his nephew
Barrymore’s wife[180] was foremost in her congratulations, there was a
touch of the philosopher-uncle in Robert Boyle’s superlatively polite
reply. “Alas! The little gentleman and I,” he assured her, “are still at
the old defiance.”
Not till 1652, after Cromwell’s campaign was over, and the war in Ireland
nearly at an end, did Robert Boyle revisit the land of his birth. And
then he did not like it. “I must sadly confess,” he wrote, in very
evident dejection, to his Dorsetshire friend, John Mallett, “that the
perpetual hurry I live in, my frequent journeys, and the necessary
trouble of endeavouring to settle my long-neglected and disjointed
fortune, has left me very little time to converse with any book save the
Bible, and scarce allowed me time to sew together some loose sheets that
contain my thoughts about the Scriptures.”
It must have been with a strange conflict of feelings that he found
himself at last in Youghal, standing before the tomb of his great father,
on the very scene of the old Earl’s last struggle in the Protestant and
Royalist cause. He wandered about the house and gardens of Lismore once
again, and found this home of his childhood, in his father’s day “one of
the noblest seats and greatest ornaments of the province of Munster,” now
“ruined by the sad fate of war.”[181] The fortunes of the Boyle family
were at this time at their lowest ebb, and everywhere that he went he was
in the track of the brutalities of war; the very bloodstains of those
last engagements could scarcely have been dried; the severed head and
limbs must still have been sticking on the poles. “About the years 1652
and 1653 ... the plague and famine had swept away whole counties, that a
man might travel twenty or thirty miles and not see a living creature,
either man, beast, or bird, they being either all dead, or had quit those
desolate places.” And in the mountains so greatly had the number of
wolves increased, that rewards were being offered for wolves’ heads.[182]
But already, under Cromwell’s powerful lord-lieutenancy, and with
Fleetwood as head of the Irish Government, the work of settlement and
transplantation had been begun. It was in part, perhaps, the work of
transplantation in Connaught—for Robert Boyle had lands there as well as
in Munster—that called him to Ireland in 1652. He was back in London, on
a flying visit, in the autumn of 1653, just between Cromwell’s dismissal
of the _Rump_ and the sitting of the _Barebones_ Parliament; when, in
fact, “This House” was “to be let—now unfurnished.”[183]
But he was in Ireland again a month or two before Cromwell’s Protectorate
was proclaimed in London, and living in Dublin through the winter of
1653-4. William Petty, his fellow-Invisible, was also there, and Benjamin
Worsley, the old Army surgeon, a great friend of Hartlib and of the Boyle
family. Petty had been appointed by Ireton physician-general to the Army,
and was doing wonderful things in organisation, amongst other things
saving the Government several hundreds a year in their drug department
alone. Worsley, a delightful man in his way, full of the most astonishing
scientific projects for the benefit of seventeenth-century science,
had been appointed surveyor-general, to take in hand the land-survey
necessary in the process of transplantation. In Petty’s opinion Worsley
was a bit of a quack, whose “mountain-bellied conceptions” ended usually
in “abortive mice”; and when Worsley began his survey Petty thought it
could be better and quicker done, and said so. The Government backed
Petty, in whom they had got hold of a man of extraordinary genius and
energy; and while Worsley was kept on as surveyor-general, Petty was
allowed to contract to do the work of land-survey in thirteen months,
importing skilled labour and London-made instruments.[184] And meantime,
Robert Boyle, under Petty’s guidance, was working quietly in an
anatomical laboratory in Dublin. Petty, in his outspoken way, had written
to Boyle while Boyle was on his flying visit to London in 1653. Petty and
Robert Boyle’s own relations in Dublin were at this time a little anxious
about Boyle’s health and spirits; and urged by the relatives, Petty had
written in the character of physician and friend, offering Boyle some
sound advice. He wrote to “dissuade” him from “some things which my lord
of Cork, my lord of Broghill, and some others of your friends think
prejudicial to you; one of which is your continual reading.” Too much
reading, Petty thought, “weakens the brain,” which weakness “causeth
defluxions” and these “hurt the lungs.” In Petty’s opinion Boyle, who
knew so much already, could get but little advantage from the constant
study of books. Warming with his subject, Petty adventures a little more
advice.
“The next disease you labour under is your apprehension of many diseases,
and a continual fear that you are always inclining, or falling into, one
or other.” He reminds Boyle how “this is incident to all that begin the
study of diseases”; how “inward causes” may produce “different outward
signs,” and those “little rules of prognostication, found in our books,
need not always be so religiously believed.” And even if people do fall
ill, do they not also sometimes get well again? “Why may not a man as
easily recover of a disease, without much care, as fall into it?” And
then, to wind up with: “The last indictment that I lay against you
is, practising upon yourself with medicaments (though specifics) not
sufficiently tried by those that administer or advise them.”
Physician as he was, Petty did not put his faith in “medicaments”—witness
his savings in the Army drug department. “There is a conceit current in
the world,” he told Robert Boyle, “that a medicament may be physic and
physician alike.” What a mistake!
“Recommendations of medicaments do not make them useful, but do only
incite me to make them so by endeavouring experimentally to find out the
virtues and application of them.” And it is a hard matter to discover
their true virtues. “As I weep to consider,” says Petty, “so I dread to
use them, without my utmost endeavour first employed to that purpose.”
It is a manly, outspoken letter, though it may have seemed a little
caustic at the time. And it had its effect. Robert Boyle came back to
Dublin to work, under Petty’s direction, at anatomical dissection—and
possibly to read less. He was still ailing, still dejected, still longing
to be back in London; but, “that I may not live wholly useless,” he wrote
to Mr. Clodius, Hartlib’s doctor son-in-law in London, “or altogether a
stranger in the study of Nature, since I want glasses and furnaces to
make a chemical analysis of inanimate bodies, I am exercising myself in
making anatomical dissections of living animals, wherein (being assisted
by your father-in-law’s ingenious friend, Dr. Petty (our General’s
Physician)) I have satisfied myself of the circulation of the blood and
the (freshly discovered and hardly discoverable) _receptaculi chyli_,
made by the confluence of the _venæ lacteæ_, and have seen (especially
in the dissections of fishes) more of the variety and contrivances of
Nature and the majesty and wisdom of her Author than all the books I ever
read in my life could give me convincing notions of.” While he is kept a
prisoner in Ireland, he says, he will be delighted if there is anything
he can do to help Clodius in an anatomical way; if there is anything
“wherein my knives may give you any satisfaction, I shall be very proud
to employ them to so elevated an end.” Meantime he was doing as Clodius
had asked him—looking into the “mineral advantages of Ireland.” But “in
this illiterate country, I find all men so perfect strangers to matters
of that nature, that my inquiries have been as fruitless as diligent.”
He can hear nothing about antimony mines; “but for iron I may be able
to give you a good account of it, and to bring you over of the ore, my
eldest brother having upon his land an iron-work that now yields him
a good revenue, and I having upon my own land an iron-mine, to which,
before the wars, belonged a (since ruined) work, which I have thoughts
of resetting up. I am likewise told (but how truly I know not yet) of a
little silver-mine lying in some land of mine; and very lately in a place
which belongs to a brother of mine they have found silver ore very rich,
for, being tried, it is estimated (as he tells me that means to deal for
it) at between thirty and forty pounds a ton; but whether or no this be
a mine of proportionable value we do not yet know. I was yesterday with
an officer of the Army who farms a silver-mine for the State, who hath
promised me what assistance he can in my mineral inquiries, and told me
that a metallist and refiner whom he extolled with superlative elogies
assured him that there was no country in Europe so rich in mines as
Ireland, had but the inhabitants the industry to seek them, and the skill
to know them.”
But Robert Boyle was impatient to leave Ireland. “I live here in a
barbarous country,” he told Clodius in this letter, “where chemical
spirits are so misunderstood, and chemical instruments so unprocurable,
that it is hard to have any hermetic thoughts in it and impossible to
bring them to experiment.”
In the autumn of 1654 he was back in England. In the previous year,
during his flying visit to London, he had talked with Dr. Wilkins, of
Wadham, about Oxford, and had probably ridden down to Oxford to see
what it was like. Stalbridge was all very well, but it was removed from
the by-paths of intelligence; somehow, since his illnesses, there was a
sadness over its orchards which Vulcan himself could not dispel. London
was a fascinating labyrinth of interests, but in Oxford he believed
he could “live to philosophy.” Oxford was to be his Athens. Thither,
already, some of the Invisibles had migrated from London. For it was no
longer the old Royalist Oxford, where the sunburnt boy with the bow and
arrows had once thought of joining the King’s Army. It was Oxford six
years after the Parliament’s Visitation and Purgation; Oxford after the
imposition of the Covenant. The old Heads had conformed or been summarily
ejected, the new Heads were Commonwealth men; and Cromwell himself was
Chancellor. It was an Oxford where the use of the Liturgy was not openly
permitted. And yet, “speech is thrall, but thocht is free,” says the old
Scottish proverb. At Oxford a man could still fast quietly, if he was
so minded, for forty-one hours, without being sent down for it.[185] At
Oxford one might still study philosophy, and mathematics, and Oriental
languages unimpeded. And there was the Bodleian. Oxford was indeed “the
only place in England where, at that time, Mr. Boyle could have lived
with much satisfaction to himself.”[186]
His horse would carry him between Oxford and London at any time: each
night, on the road, he might lie under some hospitable roof of friend
or relative, in mansions set in shady parks, amid flower-gardens and
fishponds. And once in London, his sister Ranelagh’s door in the Old Mall
was always open to him. And Gresham College, and Mr. Hartlib, and Mr.
Clodius, and the rest of the Invisibles would receive him with ecstasy.
The Hartlib family had moved to Charing Cross; and Hartlib and his “very
chemical son” were excessively happy in their new abode.
“As for us, poor earthworms, we are crawling in my house about our
quondam back-kitchen, whereof my son hath made a goodly laboratory; yea,
such a one, as men (who have had the favour and privilege to see or be
admitted into it) affirm they have never seen the like for its several
advantages and commodiousnesses. It hath been employed days and nights
with no small success, God be praised, these many weeks together.”[187]
London was labyrinthine: there was an undeniable fascination about
Hartlib’s quondam back-kitchen; but Oxford beckoned. And so, at the age
of twenty-seven, Robert Boyle went to Oxford; a student always, already
known as a scholar and philosopher, one of the chief of the Invisibles,—a
ready-made Don.