* A Distributed Proofreaders Canada eBook *

This eBook is made available at no cost and with very few
restrictions. These restrictions apply only if (1) you make
a change in the eBook (other than alteration for different
display devices), or (2) you are making commercial use of
the eBook. If either of these conditions applies, please
contact an FP administrator before proceeding.

This work is in the Canadian public domain, but may be under
copyright in some countries. If you live outside Canada, check your
country's copyright laws. IF THE BOOK IS UNDER COPYRIGHT
IN YOUR COUNTRY, DO NOT DOWNLOAD OR REDISTRIBUTE THIS FILE.


Title: The Cabinet Portrait Gallery of British Worthies Vol 9 of 12
Date of first publication: 1846
Editor: Knight, Charles (1791-1873)
Date first posted: October 8 2012
Date last updated: October 8 2012
Faded Page eBook #20121013

This eBook was produced by: Marcia Brooks, L. Harrison
& the online Distributed Proofreaders Canada team at http://www.pgdpcanada.net

(This file was produced from images generously made available by
The Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries)




  THE
  CABINET PORTRAIT GALLERY
  OF
  BRITISH WORTHIES.

  VOLUME IX.

  LONDON:
  CHARLES KNIGHT & CO., LUDGATE STREET.

  1846.




  London: Printed by W. CLOWES and SONS, Stamford Street.




CONTENTS.


                       Page

  ALGERNON SIDNEY         5

  WILLIAM PETTY          24

  THOMAS SYDENHAM        53

  ROBERT BOYLE           61

  RICHARD BAXTER         79

  HENRY PURCELL          90




  CABINET PORTRAIT GALLERY
  OF
  BRITISH WORTHIES.




[Illustration: ALGERNON SIDNEY.]


Algernon Sidney, or Sydney, famed as one of the stanchest of modern
republicans, came partly of the same stock as the very loyal and
poetical Sir Philip Sidney, that ornament of the Elizabethan age.
Algernon was the second surviving son of Robert, second Earl of
Leicester of that creation, and of his wife Dorothy, eldest daughter
of Henry Earl of Northumberland. Neither the place nor the date of his
birth is mentioned; but he is supposed to have been born in the year
1621 or 1622, towards the close of the reign of James I., and it is
most probable that Penshurst, in Kent, was his birth-place.

When his father, the Earl of Leicester, in 1632, went as ambassador
from Charles I. to the court of Denmark, he took his young son
Algernon with him; and four years after he likewise accompanied his
father on his embassy to France. By this early residence in foreign
countries he must have acquired that facility of learning languages
for which he was somewhat distinguished among his contemporaries. But
of his education very little is known. It is probable that, during his
residence in Paris, he frequented the French schools and colleges, or
was placed by his father under French masters. Although constitutional
liberty had almost entirely disappeared in France, and the government
of that country had been converted into a most absolute monarchy,
there was a latent, abstract love of republican institutions among
many of the French professors (albeit ecclesiastics) and men of
letters, and the great commonwealths and republican heroes of
antiquity were, almost exclusively, proposed as the studies and models
of youths. This continued to obtain down to the outbreak of the great
French Revolution in 1789; and many of the lamentable errors,
blunders, and crimes of that Revolution, are to be clearly and
directly traced to a blind and passionate imitation of the sternest
Republicans of Greece and Rome, whose deeds were, in part, repugnant
to the religious faith and feelings of modern society, and in good
part misunderstood by their professed imitators. No doubt, this
admiration for the ancient forms of republican government was, among
the French--as also in the greater part of Italy,--all the stronger
from the despotically monarchic character of their own institutions,
and all the blinder, more passionate, and unreasoning from their long
and total exclusion from practical self-government, and from their
consequent want of acquaintance with the real workings of an actually
free or representative government. The languages of Greece and Rome
absorbed the attention of the youths of England perhaps even more than
that of the young students of France, and Oxford and Cambridge were
constantly re-echoing the fame of the antique republican worthies; but
when an Englishman quitted his college and the world that was, for the
world that is, he saw the actual operation of a mixed and comparatively
free government, he came in contact with practical men familiar with
parliaments or municipal councils, and he saw that he himself might one
day have a share, more or less prominent, in the government of his
country or in some of its municipal administrations. He could then
compare the ancient Republics with a modern limited monarchy; the French
could only contrast them with their own despotism. What we now call the
British Constitution was not really born until five years after Algernon
Sidney's death; and, at the time of his birth, the despotic temper of
the Tudors, the speculative absolutism of James I. and his scandalous
disuse of Parliaments, had certainly made great inroads on the old
liberties of the country; but still the municipal freedom--the source
of, and the best security for, all constitutional liberty--had scarcely
been touched, and Englishmen had the habits of a free people, and much
practice in governing themselves.

From whatever cause it may have proceeded, Sidney's republicanism does
not appear of English growth; it bears no resemblance to the devout
and mystical republicanism of Sir Harry Vane, the vulgar conventicle
republicanism of General Harrison, or the camp republicanism of
Ludlow--still less does it resemble the adaptive republicanism of
Milton--it has an exotic, antique character, hard, unimaginative, and
impracticable, having hardly anything in common either with the theory
or the practice of any of the remarkable men that made the short-lived
English Commonwealth. These men looked at the existing Republics of
Holland, Switzerland, Genoa, Venice: Sidney hardly condescended to
look lower than Greece and Rome.

His first entrance upon public life was in 1641, when he was about
nineteen or twenty years old. The Irish Papists had risen in rebellion
and had perpetrated a horrible massacre of the Protestants. The Earl
of Leicester, Algernon's father, was then Lord-Lieutenant, and
Algernon commanded a troop of horse in the Earl's own regiment. Both
he and his elder brother, Lord Viscount Lisle, distinguished
themselves by their gallantry in the campaigns of 1641 and 1642,
during which a fearful retaliation was inflicted upon the Irish. It
became a fixed unalterable belief with the adversaries of that unhappy
prince, that Charles I. had secretly promoted the insurrection as a
means of thwarting the designs of that Parliament, with which he was
on the very verge of a civil war.

Returning to England in August, 1643, when the civil war was raging,
and when English blood had been shed in torrents at Edgehill, at
Chalgrove, at Newbury, and in many other sternly-contested fields,
Algernon and his elder brother, who professed to be on their way to
join the king, then at Oxford, were seized as they landed in
Lancashire, by order of the Parliament. By this incident they lost the
favour of Charles, who believed that before quitting Ireland they had
made up their minds to join his enemies, and that their capture was of
their own contrivance. Similar _ruses_, common in most civil wars,
were not unknown in this.

Both Algernon and his elder brother, Lord Lisle, forthwith joined the
Parliamentarians. Algernon became captain of a troop of horse in the
regiment of the Presbyterian Earl of Manchester, who, in brief space
of time, was driven from his high command by Cromwell and Fairfax, and
the self-denying ordinances. In April, 1645, Fairfax, as lord-general,
or commander-in-chief for Parliament, raised Algernon to the rank of
Colonel, and gave him a regiment; and in 1646, his brother, Lord
Lisle, having become lieutenant-general of Ireland, he was made
lieutenant-general of the horse in that kingdom, and governor of
Dublin. His name, at this period, frequently occurs in the pages of
Rushworth and Whitelock, the two great annalists or registrars of the
Parliamentarians; and he is generally mentioned as a brave and active
officer whose faith and steadiness to Parliament were undoubted. In
fact, he was now himself a member of the Long Parliament, having been
returned member for Cardiff at the beginning of the year 1646, before
he went to Dublin. In May, 1647, having returned to London, Algernon
received the thanks of the House of Commons for his services in
Ireland, and was appointed governor of Dover Castle. In 1648, though
then only twenty-six or twenty-seven years of age, he, as well as his
brother, Lord Lisle, acted as one of the judges on the irregular trial
of Charles I. It is said that he was not present when the sentence was
passed, and he certainly did not sign the warrant for the execution.
But he afterwards justified that execution, and thereby, and by other
words and acts, he drew down upon himself the implacable resentment of
the Royalist party, whose hour of vengeance was coming.

When Cromwell resolved to break up the remnant of the Long Parliament,
called the Rump, which was certainly throwing, or threatening to
throw, the whole nation into a state of anarchy, he looked upon
Algernon Sidney as a very dangerous and obstinate member of it,--as a
pragmatical and resolute republican, who would be sure to oppose the
trying of his grand political problem or experiment,--"_What if a man
should take upon him to be king?_"

Algernon was in his place when Oliver arrived in the House to "take
away that bauble" (the speaker's mace), to turn out the members, lock
up the doors, and carry off the keys in his pocket. And Algernon
continued firm in his seat, thinking, mayhap, of the Roman senators in
their curule chairs and of the impious Gauls who took them by the
beard, when the musqueteers had been called in, and had forcibly
thrust out Sir Harry Vane, Wentworth, and Harry Marten. In this
attitude of contemplative defiance Algernon attracted the eye of
Cromwell, who shouted to Harrison (who was as active in ending this
parliament as Colonel Pride had been in purging it), "Put him out! Put
that man out!" Harrison told Sidney that he must rise and be gone.
Sidney replied that he would not go; and he sate until the
lord-general shouted again "Put him out!" and until Harrison and
Worsley laid their hands upon his shoulders, as if they would force
him. Then the indignant republican rose, and walked towards the door.
In a few more seconds the house was entirely cleared--"For," says
Whitelock, who was present, "among all the parliament, of whom many
wore swords, and would sometimes brag high, not one man offered to
draw his sword against Cromwell, or to make the least resistance
against him, but all of them tamely departed the house."[A]

Among the one hundred and thirty-nine persons,--"Known persons,
fearing God and of approved integrity"--whom Cromwell, after his
unceremonious dissolution of the Rump, chose to be a parliament or
convention, and summoned to Westminster by his own writ, was Sir
Anthony Ashley Cooper, afterwards Earl of Shaftesbury, and a close
political associate of Algernon Sidney.

Upon his expulsion Algernon withdrew into the country. It is said that
he would never enter into any compromise with the Cromwellians, or
accept of any post, service, or kindness from the Protector; but it
does not very clearly appear that the Protector ever tempted him with
the offer of such things. In 1658, when Oliver made his new upper
house, or House of Lords, or "other house," as it was more commonly
called, Algernon's elder brother, Lord Lisle, who appears to have been
of an accommodating spirit, was chosen by the Protector to be a member
of it. But Algernon remained in retirement during the whole of the
protectorate of Cromwell and his son Richard. There is reason to
believe that he resided chiefly at the family seat of Penshurst,
where, in the midst of quiet, pleasant, pastoral scenery, the gifted
Sir Philip Sidney had been born, and where he was thought by some to
have written his 'Arcadia.' The mind of Algernon was much less likely
to derive inspiration from those Kentish scenes.

In May, 1659, only nine months after the death of the great Oliver,
the members of the Rump restored themselves as a legitimate
parliament; or, rather, they were restored by the army and Lambert
and Fleetwood, as they had been dismissed by the army and Cromwell and
Harrison. About one hundred members took their seats "to improve," as
they loudly proclaimed, "the present opportunity, and settle and
secure the peace and freedom of the Commonwealth." Their first
proceeding was to pass a declaration that there should no longer be
any single person, protectorate, kingship, or House of Peers. Algernon
Sidney now reappeared in public; and Richard Cromwell, happy to retire
into private life, signed his demission, from the protectorate, in
form. On the 13th of May, Sidney was nominated, by the Republicans,
one of their new Council of State. This council seized all the powers
which had been so triumphantly wielded by Oliver Cromwell: it
consisted of thirty-one persons, who, though all professing
republicanism, differed very widely in their views, aspirations, and
interests: Sir Harry Vane, and Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper
(Shaftesbury), were members of it, and so also were Fairfax, Lambert,
Fleetwood, Desborough, Bradshaw, Haselrig, Ludlow, St. John, and
Whitelock. Two of them--Whitelock and Anthony Ashley Cooper--were
almost immediately accused of carrying on a secret correspondence
"with Charles Stuart and Sir Edward Hyde, beyond seas;" others were
set down as visionaries or madmen who would ruin the good old cause,
without meaning it; and, while they disagreed among themselves and
disgusted all the Cromwellians, they lost the confidence of the
downright republicans, whose energy had been great, but whose number
had always been very limited.

At this crisis, when his darling republic was falling to pieces, and
when General Monk, with a full assurance of success, was preparing to
bring in Charles II. without limitations or conditions, Algernon
Sidney accepted a diplomatic mission, and went to Denmark, along with
Sir Robert Honeywood and Mr. Borne, to help in negotiating a peace
between that country and Sweden. And now the catastrophe was
precipitated by a quarrel between the Rump and the army, who had
restored them. Oblivious of their recent obligations, and of their
present distractions, dependency, and helplessness, they resolved to
wrest the command from the officers who had reseated them, and
insisted that new commissions should be taken out from themselves or
their Council of State, and that the whole army should be immediately
placed in a proper dependency on the civil power--_i. e._, on the
Rump, who had no other right to be a parliament or council than that
which the army had given them. As might have been foreseen, the men of
the sword and of action, instead of submitting to be turned out
themselves, turned out the men of the pen and of speeches and
theories. The rough, blunt Desborough explained, in a very few words,
the whole logic of the army. "Because," said he, "the parliament
intended to dismiss _us_, we had a right to dismiss _the parliament_."
This was, in effect, the death sentence of the Commonwealth.

Sidney was absent upon his mission when the restoration of Charles II.
took place. In a letter written to him by his father shortly after the
Restoration, and published in 'Familiar Letters, written by John late
Earl of Rochester, and several other Persons of Honour,' 8vo., London,
1697, the Earl mentions a report which he had heard, that when the
university of Copenhagen brought Sidney their album, and desired him
to write something in it, he wrote,--

      "... Manus hæc inimica tyrannis
      Ense petit placidam sub libertate quietem,"

and signed the verses with his name. This anecdote is confirmed by
Lord Molesworth, who, in the Preface to his 'Account of Denmark'
(first published in 1694), tells us, that even while Sidney was still
at the Danish court, "M. Terlon, the French ambassador, had the
confidence to tear out of the Book of Mottoes in the king's library"
the above lines, "which Mr. Sidney, according to the liberty allowed
to all noble strangers, had written in it." "Though M. Terlon," adds
Lord Molesworth, "understood not a word of Latin, he was told by
others the meaning of that sentence, which he considered as a libel
upon the French government, and upon such as was then setting up in
Denmark by French assistance or example."[B] His father intimates,
that this and some other things he had heard of him made him hesitate
about speaking to the king in his behalf, as he had intended to do.
"It is also said," continues the Earl, "that a minister who hath
married a Lady Laurence here at Chelsea, but now dwelling at
Copenhagen, being there in company with you, said, 'I think you were
none of the late king's judges, nor guilty of his death,' meaning our
king. 'Guilty!' said you. 'Do you call that a fault? Why, it was the
justest and bravest action that ever was done in England, or anywhere
else;' with other words to the same effect. It is said also that, you
having heard of a design to seize upon you, or to cause you to be
taken prisoner, you took notice of it to the King of Denmark himself,
and said, 'I hear there is a design to seize upon me; but who is it
that hath that design? _Est ce notre bandit?_' by which you are
understood to mean the king. Besides this, it is reported that you
have been heard to say many scornful and contemptuous things of the
king's person and family, which, unless you can justify yourself, will
hardly be forgiven or forgotten; for such personal offences make
deeper impressions than public actions, either of war or treaty."

It is probable that none of these reports were to be gainsayed.
Sidney, in his answer to his father, says, "That which I am reported
to have written in the book at Copenhagen is true; and, never having
heard that any sort of men were so worthily the objects of enmity as
those I mentioned, I did never in the least scruple avowing myself to
be an enemy unto them." Accordingly, instead of coming home, he
proceeded first to Hamburg, whence he went to Frankfort, and from
thence to Rome, where he proposed to take up his residence. About the
middle of the year 1661, however, he was forced to remove to Frascati;
and he is afterwards traced to various places in Germany, France, and
the Low Countries. At Rome he was remarked as a brave, free-speaking
man, an admirable horseman, and an accomplished Italian scholar. In
1665 he was at the Hague, actively employed, along with other English
exiles of the same political principles, in urging the States of
Holland to invade England. During the disastrous, and, to the English
government, disgraceful year 1667, some of the most fanatic of these
exiles came over with De Ruyter and his Dutch fleet to the Thames and
the Medway, and assisted in burning our men-of-war at Chatham.
Algernon was at this time in Paris, urging Louis XIV. to declare war
against Charles II., and endeavouring to impress upon that
ultra-absolute monarch the inestimable advantage he and France would
derive from the establishment of a republic in England. In a memorial
to Louis, he engaged to procure a rising in England, if his Most
Christian Majesty would only allow him a grant of 100,000 crowns.
While the republican Sidney was begging for this money, Charles II.,
unknown to him, was making himself the pensioner of France, and was
obtaining large sums from Louis XIV., for the avowed purpose of doing
away with parliaments, and making the power of the crown absolute in
England! With such republicans and such a king, the liberties of the
English people were well nigh put in jeopardy. After long and
fruitless solicitations to Louis, and intrigues with his ministers or
their employés, Algernon withdrew, irritated, despondent, and very
poor, into Gascony. There he appears to have remained until, in 1677,
a pardon for his part in the late king's trial, &c., and permission
for him to return home, were obtained from Charles II., on his own
plea that he was anxiously desirous to see his aged and infirm father,
the Earl of Leicester, once more before he died.

It is commonly stated that Sidney's pardon was obtained through the
interest of the Earl of Sunderland, who was the son of his sister
Dorothy (Waller's 'Sacharissa'); but he himself, in a letter to the
Hon. Henry Savile, then the English ambassador at the court of France,
appears to attribute it to that gentleman's exertions. "My obligation
unto you," he says, "I so far acknowledge . . . to be the greatest
that I have in a long time received from any man, as not to value the
leave you have obtained for me to return into my country, after so
long an absence, at a lower rate than the saving of my life."

The Earl died that same year (1677), and, although he had never
approved of the course his son Algernon had taken, left him a legacy
of 5100_l._, with which, he says, in his 'Apology,' dated on the day
of his death, he would have immediately returned to Gascony, if he had
not been detained by a long and tedious suit in Chancery, in which he
was involved by his elder brother, now Earl of Leicester, choosing to
dispute his father's will. Before this, Sidney appears to have been
only assisted by his father with irregular and scanty remittances; and
during his wanderings on the Continent he was often in great straits.

It was impossible that Sidney should long remain quiet in England. The
misgovernment of the country, the vices of Charles II., the fanatical
and tyrannical temper of his brother the Duke of York, the next in
succession to the throne, excited the heads and hearts of cool,
dispassionate men, and drove those of a less happy temperament into a
frenzy. Many even of those who were attached to monarchy and the old
institutions of the country foresaw the inevitableness of some great
change--a change afterwards realized by the revolution of 1688, which
put the crown upon the head of the politic, wise, and truly great
William Prince of Orange.

In 1678, the year after his return, and the year which witnessed the
most disgraceful, abominable parts of the Parliamentary proceedings
against the so-called "Popish Plot," Sidney was a candidate for the
representation of Guildford. Being defeated in that election, he stood
in 1679 for Bramber. Being again defeated by a court candidate, he
petitioned against the return of his opponent, and was only unseated
after a double return. He had thus openly taken his stand as the
opponent of the king who had granted him his free pardon; and he was
generally looked upon as leagued with the Earl of Shaftesbury (the Sir
Anthony Ashley Cooper of former days), William Lord Russell, Lord
Essex, Mr. Hampden, Trenchard, and the other popular leaders, who
differed widely among themselves in their principles and views, but
the designs of the most moderate of whom certainly extended to such a
change of government as would have amounted to a revolution. At this
moment Algernon Sidney, together with a score more of the patriots,
received money from France; for Louis XIV., having little reliance on
the steadiness or good faith of his pensioner Charles, was very
desirous of strengthening our Parliamentary opposition, in order that
they might bring about the reduction of the English army, and so bind
their king to a neutrality, which must greatly favour that career of
aggression and conquest the French had commenced on the continent of
Europe. Though far, indeed, from being so rich as that nobleman,
Sidney was no more a mean and mercenary man than William Lord Russell;
and if he really took money from the French court, we may conclude
that it was only to distribute it among others. As we have already
said,--in our memoir of Lord Russell,--the papers discovered by Sir
John Dalrymple, in the Archives at Versailles, are still open to doubt
and rational controversy.[C] M. Barillon, the French minister at
London, whose reputation is none of the best, may have charged his
court with sums of money he never disbursed. Sidney was not in
parliament, but he was closely united with those who were, and he was
considered as the head of a small, disaffected party.

In a despatch dated 5th December, 1680, Barillon writes, "The Sieur
Algernoon Sydney is a man of great views and very high designs, which
tend to the establishment of a republic. He is in the party of the
Independents and other sectaries; and this party were masters during
the last troubles. They are not at present very powerful in
parliament, but they are strong in London; and it is through the
intrigues of the Sieur Algernoon Sidney that one of the two sheriffs,
named Bethal, has been elected. The Duke of Buckingham is of the same
party, and believes himself at the head, &c. . . . The service which I
may draw from Mr. Sidney does not appear, for his connections are with
obscure and concealed persons; but he is intimate with the Sieur Jones
[Sir William Jones, lately attorney-general], who is a man of the
greatest knowledge in the laws of England, and will be chancellor, if
the party opposed to the court shall gain the superiority, and the
Earl of Shaftesbury be contented with any other employment." And in
the account of his disbursements among the patriots, from the 22nd
December, 1678, to the 14th December, 1679, Barillon twice sets down
the name of the Sieur Algernon Sidney, and for 500 guineas each
time.[D]

In a despatch dated the 30th of September, 1680, Barillon describes
the arguments Sidney was accustomed to use with him to show that it
was for the interest of France that England should be revolutionized
and converted into a republic.[E]

The sheriff, named Bethal by the French minister, was the Whig sheriff
Bethell, who, with his Whig colleague Cornish, so long succeeded in
returning popular juries, and in thus thwarting the Court and the
Tories. [See Memoir of William Lord Russell.] When determined Tories
had been despotically thrust by the king into the places of Bethell
and Cornish, and when Tory juries had been made sure of, the Rye House
Plot was announced. In consequence of revelations made by the
infamous Lord Howard of Escrick, Sidney was thrown into the Tower a
few days after Russell. But for the republican enthusiasm and
credulity of Sidney this traitor would never have been admitted (as he
indisputably was) to the secret conferences of the patriots. Among
other matter Howard of Escrick deposed that Sidney had undertaken to
manage a treasonable correspondence with the fugitive Earl of Argyle
and the disaffected Whigs and Cameronians in Scotland, and had sent
one Aaron Smith into Scotland, after having given him 60 guineas.
Another traitor to the patriots--a lawyer, named West, who increased
the number and swelled the size of his depositions just as the Court
party wished--swore that Colonel Algernon Sidney had held a close
correspondence with the rebellious Scots, and had been present in secret
conclaves in London, wherein it was resolved to shoot the king, &c.

Both in the council-chamber, into which he was brought to be examined,
and in his dungeon in the Tower, Sidney displayed a sort of Roman
fortitude and taciturnity. He told the king and his ministers that he
would not answer their ensnaring questions; that they must seek
evidence against him from some other man.

Russell was tried on the 13th and executed on the 21st of July [1683].
Sidney was not put upon his trial until four months later. He was
brought up to the bar of the King's Bench to plead, on the 7th of
November, and his trial took place on the 21st, before Sir George
Jeffreys, lately promoted to the place of Lord Chief Justice. Jeffreys
exhibited little of his wonted coarseness and passion on this
occasion; but his demeanour was very determined and inflexible, and he
bore down every objection of the prisoner with an authority that
nothing could shake or impress. The only evidence produced in court in
support of the principal facts charged was Lord Howard of Escrick, who
had, according to his own account, been a party to the plot, and now
came to swear away the lives of his associates in order to save his
own; and as the law of high treason required two witnesses to prove
the crime, the other was supplied by bringing forward a manuscript
found among Sidney's papers, and asserted, no doubt with truth, to be
his hand-writing, which, it was pretended, contained an avowal and
defence of principles the same, or of the same nature, with those
involved in the alleged plot. There was a fearlessness, a noble pride
in the demeanour of the prisoner. When asked whether he would put any
questions to the witness, Lord Howard, he replied with withering
scorn, "No! I have no questions to ask such as he!" At a subsequent
part of the trial, he asked the jury whether any credit was due to
such a man as my Lord Howard, who had betrayed and cozened his
friends, who deposed differently now from what he had deposed on the
trial of Lord Russell; who had denied the plot before his arrest, and
who had said since that he could not get his pardon from the king till
he had "done some other jobs"--"_until the drudgery of swearing was
over_." "Besides," added Sidney, "this Howard is my debtor for a
considerable sum; his mortgage was forfeit to me; and when I should
have taken the advantage the law gave me, he found a way to have me
laid up in the Tower! His lordship is a very subtile man; for as, at
Lord Russell's trial, he said he was to carry his knife between the
paring and the apple, so for this he has so managed as to get his
pardon and save his estate." Nor was he unprovided with witnesses of
name and station to assist him in making good his charges against the
miscreant. These witnesses were, two of Howard of Escrick's own
relatives, Mr. Philip and Mr. Edward Howard, the Earl of Anglesey,
Lord Clare, Lord Paget, Monsieur du Cas, a Frenchman, and Doctor
Gilbert Burnet, the historian. Sidney, however, as was to be expected
under all the circumstances, was found guilty; and being again brought
up on the 26th, was sentenced to be put to death after the revolting
manner of execution then enjoined by law in cases of high treason.
Upon hearing this sentence, he said with a loud firm voice,--"Then, O
God! O God! I beseech thee to sanctify my sufferings, and impute not
my blood to the country or the city. Let no inquisition be made for
it; but if at any day the shedding of blood that is innocent must be
revenged, let the weight of it fall only on those that maliciously
persecute me for righteousness sake." The chief justice thought
himself obliged to put up his prayer also, which he did in these
words:--"I pray God to work in you a temper fit to go unto the other
world, for I see you are not fit for this." "My Lord," replied Sidney,
stretching out his arm, "feel my pulse, and see if I am disordered. I
bless God I never was in better temper than I am now." He twice
petitioned the king for pardon; but all that could be obtained for him
was the remission of the degrading and brutal parts of his sentence;
and on Friday, the 7th of December, he was beheaded on Tower Hill. No
one ever suffered with more firmness or with less parade. He did not
even address the people; but when asked to speak, replied that he had
made his peace with God, and had nothing to say to man. A paper which
he delivered to the sheriff, and which was afterwards printed,
concluded as follows:--"The Lord sanctify these my sufferings unto me;
and though I fall as a sacrifice unto idols, suffer not idolatry to be
established in this land. . . . Grant that I may die glorifying thee
for all thy mercies, and that at the last thou hast permitted me to be
singled out as a witness of thy truth, and, even by the confession of
my very opposers, for that old cause, in which I was from my youth
engaged, and for which thou hast often and wonderfully declared
thyself." Thus perished one who has generally been considered as the
last of the Commonwealth men.

The trial and condemnation of Algernon Sidney seem to have shocked the
public feeling of the time in no ordinary degree. Even the cautious
Evelyn, after stating that he was executed "on the single witness of
that monster of a man, Lord Howard of Escrick, and some sheets of
paper taken in Mr. Sidney's study, pretended to be written by him, but
not fully proved, nor the time when, but appearing to have been
written before his majesty's restoration, and then pardoned by the Act
of Oblivion," adds, that "though Mr. Sidney was known to be a person
obstinately averse to government by a monarch (the subject of the
paper was in answer to one of Sir E. [R.?] Filmer), yet it was thought
he had very hard measure." He describes Sidney as "a man of great
courage, great sense, great parts, which he showed both at his trial
and death;" and he appears to have been looked upon universally in the
same light--by his friends as one of the ablest, by his enemies as one
of the most dangerous, of his party. While he was yet in exile,
Charles himself, in 1670, described him to Colbert, the French
minister, as one who could not be too far from England, where his
pernicious sentiments, supported with so great parts and courage,
might do much hurt. Indeed, with the exception of Shaftesbury, he was
the only person of eminent ability in the particular knot of patriots
to which he belonged. Yet he must not be confounded in intellectual,
any more than in moral character, with that brilliant and versatile
politician. A man of talent and accomplishments he was, but
narrow-minded, opinionative, and egotistical, to the point of utter
impracticability. Burnet describes him "as a man of most extraordinary
courage, a steady man, even to obstinacy, sincere, but of a rough and
boisterous temper, that could not bear contradiction, but would give
foul language upon it." "He seemed to be a Christian," adds the
bishop, "but in a particular form of his own; he thought it was to be
like a divine philosophy in the mind; but he was against all public
worship and everything that looked like a church. He was stiff to all
republican principles, and such an enemy to everything that looked
like monarchy, that he set himself in a high opposition against
Cromwell when he was made protector. He had studied the history of
government in all its branches beyond any man I ever knew."

In an anecdote, which has many times been quoted in his praise, we can
see nothing to commend or admire. The story is, that during his
residence in France he shot a beautiful horse rather than give or sell
it to the king, who greatly admired it; saying that the steed which
had been ridden by a free man like himself should never be mounted by
a tyrant like Louis XIV. If this be true, what is there in it but a
mad bravado, and an act of cruelty to a noble animal? But we believe
it to be a fable. Sidney was too poor at the time to have a costly
horse. But if he had had one, and had behaved in the manner described,
Louis, assuredly, would have clapped him up in the Bastile, or have
turned him out of France.

Sidney's 'Discourses concerning Government' were first published in
1698, with a short preface by John Toland; again in 1704, and a third
time in 1751, at the expense of Mr. Thomas Hollis, who prefixed a Life
of the Author, and also printed for the first time his 'Apology,'
already mentioned. This edition of the works of Algernon Sidney was
reproduced in 1772 by Mr. Brand Hollis, to whom Mr. Thomas Hollis left
his property, with notes and corrections by Mr. J. Robertson, and the
addition of some letters and other short pieces of Sidney's, all
previously published, together with a tract entitled 'A General View
of Government in Europe,' first printed in James Ralph's anonymous
publication entitled 'Of the Use and Abuse of Parliaments,' 2 vols.
8vo., Lond., 1744, and there attributed to Sidney, but which Robertson
says he is convinced "is the production of a different hand." In fact,
there is no doubt that it is spurious. The two editions of 1751 and
1772 both contain 'Letters of the Honourable Algernon Sidney to the
Honourable Henry Savile, ambassador in France in the year 1679,' &c.,
which originally appeared in an octavo volume in 1742. Particulars
relating to Algernon will also be found in Arthur Collins's 'Memoirs
of the Lives and Actions of the Sidneys,' prefixed to his 'Letters and
Memorials of State,' 2 vols. fol., Lond., 1746; and in Blencowe's
'Sidney Papers,' 8vo., Lond., 1825. Collins states that several
treatises by Sidney, in Latin and Italian, and also an 'Essay on
Virtuous Love,' in English, remain in his own hand-writing at
Penshurst. A Life of Algernon Sidney, by George William Meadley, was
published in 1813.

Sidney's Trial was printed in 1684, but it is said to have passed
through the hands of Jeffreys, who struck out whatever he pleased. It is
given, along with the other trials connected with the Rye House Plot, in
Howell's 'State Trials.' The reader may also be referred to 'True
Account and Declaration of the horrid Conspiracy against the late King,'
&c., written by the time-serving Bishop Sprat, and published by order of
James II. in 1685; and 'The Secret History of the Rye House Plot,' by
the infamous Ford, Lord Grey, first printed in 1754.

The attainder of Algernon Sidney was reversed after the revolution of
1688. It is observable that neither in this act of parliament nor in
the act passed in the same session reversing the attainder of Lord
Russell is there any assertion of the innocence of the convicted
party. And Mr. Hallam observes that the common accusation against the
court in Sidney's trial, "of having admitted insufficient proof by the
mere comparison of hand-writing, though alleged not only in most of
our historians, but in the act of parliament reversing Sidney's
attainder, does not appear to be well founded: the testimony to that
fact, unless the printed trial is extraordinarily falsified, being
such as would be received at present."

[Footnote A: Memorials.]

[Footnote B: By a strange and sudden revolution, the burghers of
Copenhagen, in 1660, overthrew the old Danish constitution, which had
left the powers of the state in the hands of the proud tyrannical
nobles. In seeking refuge from an oligarchical tyranny the Danes
erected a kingly despotism.]

[Footnote C: For various remarks on this mysterious subject, we refer
the reader to Mr. Hallam's 'Constitutional History,' vol. ii. p. 274,
of 4to. edition of 1827; and to the 'Pictorial History of England,'
vol. iii. p. 727.]

[Footnote D: Correspondence and Accounts as published by Sir John
Dalrymple in 'Memoirs of Great Britain and Ireland,' 4to. Lond. 1773.]

[Footnote E: Id. Id.]




[Illustration: Sir W Petty]


It often happens that extraordinary philosophical talent or inventive
ingenuity is accompanied with such simplicity of character, such
ignorance of mankind or of the world, such facility or carelessness of
disposition and temper, or such general incapacity for playing the game,
or, if you will, fighting the battle, of life, that the possessor leaves
a name which is rather a memento to point out the perils than a monument
to emblazon the triumphs of genius. Absorbed in his higher speculations
and pursuits, he is indifferent to the objects and ends which engage the
ambition of ordinary men. If he is forced to take part in the universal
struggle that is going on around him, his heart and spirit are not
there. In all that is strongest, highest, greatest, most real in him, he
lives apart, in a world of his own. He has no chance in the common
scramble in which his fellows are straining every thew and sinew--he
with his whole soul, and mind, and strength elsewhere, and with, as it
were, only his left hand at liberty. He is thrown out, very probably
thrown down and trampled into the earth.

Very different was the case of the remarkable individual whose history
we have now to relate. Endowed in ample measure with many faculties,
that which he possessed in the rarest degree of all was the faculty of
rising in the world.

Sir William Petty has himself given us an outline of his life on a
singular occasion--in the commencement of his will. He there mentions
that he was born at Rumsey, or Romsey, in Hampshire, and he afterwards
speaks of his father, mother, and grandfather having been all buried
in the church there. From other sources we learn that the day he came
into the world was Monday the 26th of May, 1623, and that he was the
eldest son of Anthony Petty, who, Aubrey the antiquary tells us, "was
by profession a clothier, and also did dye his own clothes." In his
will, dated 2nd May, 1685, Petty speaks of the memory of all his
brothers and sisters, implying that he had had several and that they
were by that time all dead. While still a boy his friend Aubrey, who
had much of his information from Petty himself, says that he took
great delight in watching the operations of smiths, carpenters,
joiners, and other artificers, so that by the time he was twelve years
old he had stored up no little mechanical knowledge, and had even
acquired considerable practical skill and dexterity in various trades
and handicrafts. His education was begun at the free-school of his
native place; and he states in his will that at the age of fifteen he
"had obtained the Latin, Greek, and French tongues, the whole body of
common arithmetic, the practical geometry and astronomy conducing to
navigation, dialling, &c., with the knowledge of several mathematical
trades." In the common printed copies of his will--for instance in
that prefixed to his _Tracts_, 8vo., Dublin, 1769, and in that given
in all the editions of Collins's Peerage, not excepting the latest by
Sir Egerton Brydges, he is made to intimate that he then went to the
university of Oxon (or Oxford). The true word is not _Oxon_ but
_Caen_. The account given by his friend Aubrey, in his _Lives_, is as
follows:--"He has told me there happened to him the most remarkable
accident of life (which he did not tell me), and which was the
foundation of all the rest of his greatness and acquiring riches. He
informed me that about fifteen, in March, he went over to Caen, in
Normandy, in a vessel that went hence, with a little stock, and began
to play the merchant, and had so good success, that he maintained
himself, and also educated himself: this I guess was that most
remarkable _accident_ that he meant. Here he learned the French
tongue, and perfected himself in Latin, and had Greek enough to serve
his turn. At Caen he studied the arts. At eighteen he was, I have
heard him say, a better mathematician than he is now; but, when
occasion is, he knows how to recur to more mathematical knowledge."
This was written in 1680. What Anthony Wood tells us, in the _Athenæ
Oxoniensis_, is to the same effect, and is indeed in all probability
abridged from the above statement of Aubrey's. Petty himself goes on
to say that his knowledge of mathematics and of practical mechanics,
and his having been at the University of Caen, prepared him for the
king's navy. Aubrey relates that he was first bound apprentice to a
sea-captain, by whom he was once drubbed with a cord for failing to
discover a landmark--a steeple upon the coast--which he was sent aloft
to look for--a circumstance which for the first time showed him that
he was purblind, or short-sighted. While he was still in the navy,
Petty tells us himself, he had at the age of twenty years gotten up
(or saved) about threescore pounds, with as much mathematics as any of
his age was known to have had. He speaks of his mathematics, we see,
as if it was so much additional money capital. And indeed, although he
may have loved, and probably did love, knowledge for its own sake, he
never forgot its value as a means or instrument. And both the
arithmetical or calculating character and the acquisitive turn of his
mind inclined him to the habit of estimating its value in that respect
in figures and by the standard of the pocket. Instead of saying with
Lord Bacon that knowledge was power, he would have said, if he had
spoken out, that knowledge was pounds, shillings, and pence--which
indeed constitute perhaps in this world the most universally felt and
the best understood species of power. He was all for the practical in
all things, and generally for the pecuniary as the most comprehensive
form of the practical.

His merit, however, in his proper line was as great as that of any man
who has ever been the architect of his own fortunes. There is no trace
of his having ever received any assistance from his father, who was
probably in poor circumstances, and who at his death in 1644 left him,
Aubrey assures us, little or nothing. Nor does any other relation
appear to have helped him after he got through his boyhood. "With this
provision," he proceeds in his own narrative, that is to say, with his
sixty pounds sterling and his mathematics--"anno 1643, when the civil
wars between the king and parliament grew hot, I went into the
Netherlands and France for three years, and, having vigorously
followed my studies, especially that of medicine, at Utrecht, Leyden,
and Amsterdam, and Paris, I returned to Romsey, where I was born,
bringing back with me my brother Anthony, whom I had bred, with about
ten pounds more than I had carried out of England." At Paris, Aubrey
and Wood tell us he made the acquaintance of his distinguished
countryman Hobbes, who had also fled from the civil storm at home,
having, with his more experienced prescience, and perhaps greater
timidity or caution of temper, been a little before Petty in effecting
his retreat--for he did not wait till the war grew hot, but made off
with himself soon after the Long Parliament commenced its sittings in
November, 1642. Petty and Hobbes, whose quick intellectual sympathy
immediately discerned the remarkable capacity of his young friend, and
who loved his company, read together the Anatomy of Vesalius; and
Petty also drew the schemes or diagrams required by Hobbes for a tract
he was writing on Optics. How he maintained himself (and, as it would
appear, his brother also) at this time is not known. Ward's
conjecture, in his _Lives of the Professors of Gresham College_,
which has been copied in the _Biographia Britannica_ and other later
accounts, that he employed himself in some sort of traffic, rests on
no sufficient evidence or authority. He told Aubrey that during this
residence in Paris he was at one time driven to so great a strait for
money, that he lived a week on two pennyworth of walnuts--"or three,"
says the conscientious antiquary, "I have forgotten which, but I
should think the former." "Query," adds Aubrey, "whether he was not
some time a prisoner there?"

By his own account, as quoted above, he would appear to have returned
to England about the end of the year 1645. The next notice we have of
him, and the first fact in what may be called his public history, is,
that on the 6th of March, 1647, a patent was granted him by the
parliament for seventeen years to teach what is called his art of
double writing. The instrument by which this was performed was of the
nature of what would now be called a copying machine, and its uses are
expounded in the following terms in a tract which Petty published the
next year, 1648, entitled 'Advice to Mr. Samuel Hartlib for the
Advancement of some particular parts of Learning:'--"There is invented
an instrument of small bulk and price, easily made and very durable,
whereby any man, even at the first sight and handling, may write two
resembling copies of the same thing at once, as serviceably and as
fast (allowing two lines upon each page for setting the instrument) as
by the ordinary way; of what nature or in what character or what
matter soever, as paper, parchment, a book, &c. the said writing, &c.
ought to be made upon. The use hereof will be very great to lawyers
and scriveners, for making of indentures and all kind of counterparts;
to merchants, intelligencers, registers, secretaries, clerks, &c.; for
copying of letters, accounts, invoices, entering of warrants, and
other records; to scholars, for transcribing of rare manuscripts, and
preserving originals from falsification and other injuries of time. It
lessens the labour of examination, serveth to discover forgeries and
surreptitious copies, and to the transacting of all businesses of
writing, as with ease and speed, so with privacy also." The
contrivance appears to have been a mechanical combination by which two
connected pens were moved at the same time and by the same action of
the hand. But it proved a failure; for in practice the greater weight
and cumbersomeness of the double pen were found to be more than a
compensation for its multiplying powers.

It probably, however, had the effect of bringing the inventor into
notice; and he would be made further known in other quarters, we may
suppose, by his tract on the Advancement of Learning, published the
following year. This was a quarto pamphlet of about thirty pages; and
Hartlib, to whom it was addressed, was the same person to whom Milton
had also addressed his letter or tractate entitled "Of Education,"
published four years before. Petty's discourse, indeed, as well as
Milton's, was mainly an exposition of an educational plan or system;
Aubrey calls it his 'Advice concerning the Education of Youth.'

We will select some of his proposals from an abstract of the work
given in the _Biographia Britannica_, as at least curiously
illustrating the character of his mind, whatever may be thought of
their real expediency or practicability. The subjects to which he
principally directs his attention are Mathematics, Physics, and the
History of Art and Nature. He proposes, in the first place, that there
should be appointed able readers of all books on these subjects; that
every book should be read by two several persons apart; and that out
of all the books one great book should be made, containing everything
valuable in them properly arranged and furnished with convenient
indexes. The first of his special proposals for the education of youth
is, that there be instituted _Ergastula Literaria_, or literary
workhouses, where children may be taught to do something towards their
living, as well as to read and write. This is exactly the idea of our
modern Schools of Industry. He would have all the children in the
kingdom trained according to this kind of education from the age of
seven years, no fees being demanded from those whose parents were too
poor to afford them. If the latter cannot gain their whole living by
their labour, let them, he says, remain somewhat the longer in the
workhouse. The fourth proposal is as follows:--"That, since few
children have need of reading before they know or can be acquainted
with the things they read of, or of writing before their thoughts are
worth the recording or they are able to put them into any form (which
we call inditing), much less of learning languages when there are
books enough for their present use in their own mother tongue, our
opinion is, that these things, being withal somewhat above their
capacity, as being to be attained by judgment, which is the weakest in
children, be deferred a while, and others more needful for them, such
as are in the order of nature before these above mentioned, and are
attainable by the help of memory, which is either most strong or
unpreoccupied in children, be studied before them. We wish, therefore,
that the educands be taught to observe and remember all sensible
objects and actions, whether they be natural or artificial, which the
educators must upon all occasions expound unto them." In subsequent
articles it is proposed that they should be habituated to such
exercises as conduce to health, strength, and agility of body; that
they should be taught to read by much more compendious methods than
those in common use, which, it is observed, is a thing certainly very
easy and feasible; that, besides writing in the common way, they
should be taught to write swiftly, and in _real_ characters, "as
likewise the dexterous use of the instrument for writing many copies
of the same thing at once;" that it may be considered whether they
should not also be taught the artificial memory; "that in no case the
art of drawing and designing be omitted, to what course of life soever
these children are to be applied; since the use thereof for expressing
the conceptions of the mind seems to be little inferior to that of
writing, and in many cases performs what by words is impossible;" that
the elements of arithmetic and geometry be studied by all; "that such
as shall have need to learn foreign languages (the use whereof would
be much lessened were the _real_ and _common_ characters brought into
practice) may be taught them by incomparably more easy ways than are
now usual;" that such as have any natural ability for music be
instructed in that art. The fifteenth and last proposal is, "that all
children, though of the highest rank, be taught some genteel
manufacture in their minority, such as these--turning of curious
figures, making mathematical instruments, dials, and how to use them
in astronomical observations; making watches and other trochilic
motions; limning, and painting on glass or in oil-colours; graving,
etching, carving, embossing, and moulding in sundry matters; the
lapidary's art in knowing, cutting, and setting jewels; grinding of
glasses, dioptrical and catoptrical; botanies and gardening; making
musical instruments; navarchy, and making models for building and
rigging of ships; architecture, and making models for houses; the
confectioner's, perfumer's, or dyer's arts; chemistry, refining
metals, and counterfeiting jewels; anatomy, making skeletons, and
excarnating bowels; making mariner's compasses, globes, and other
magnetic devices." Another part of the scheme is, that there should be
erected a _Gymnasium Mechanicum_, or College of Tradesmen, wherein one
workman at least of every trade, the most ingenious and most diligent
that could be found, should be allowed a handsome dwelling rent-free;
and that within the walls of this college, the design of which is the
advancement of all mechanical arts and manufactures, there should be a
_Nosocomium Academicum_, or institution for the treatment of diseases,
according to the most exact and perfect idea thereof; a complete
_Theatrum Botanicum_, or Botanic Garden, with stalls and cages for all
strange beasts and birds, and ponds and conservatories for all exotic
fishes--in other words, what we now call a Zoological Garden. And,
characteristically enough, the concluding part of the scheme is a
proposal for the compilation of a work, to be entitled _Vellus Aureum,
sive Facultatum Lucriferarum Descriptio Magna_ (the Golden Fleece, or
great Description of the Money-making Faculties); "wherein all the
practised ways of getting a subsistence, and whereby men raise their
fortunes, may be at large declared." Thus we have the favourite
_Luciferous_ experimenting of Bacon improved by the slightest possible
change. In Petty's notion the _Lucriferous_ was the true _Luciferous_.

The scheme, however, taken altogether, is a very remarkable conception
for a young man of four or five and twenty, and evinces a decided
capacity and habit both of ingenious and independent thinking. Some of
his suggestions have the appearance of shooting far beyond what we
should imagine to have been the spirit and ordinary intelligence of
that time, of anticipating what we are accustomed to consider the
newest of our modern ideas, and sometimes almost of transcending the
most extreme point to which discovery or speculation in this field has
been carried by any projector of the present day. But perhaps we are
somewhat apt to deceive ourselves by over-rating our superiority over
our ancestors here. In many respects both the theory and the practice
of education seem to have been fully as well understood in this and
other countries of Europe two or even three centuries ago as they are
now. In the art of teaching languages, at least, the schoolmasters of
the seventeenth, and even of the sixteenth century, certainly in
general far excelled their successors; and some of the wisest and most
effective of the improved plans that are now coming into use are only
their methods revived. Such, for instance, are literal interlineary
translations--the precedence given to the vocabulary over the
grammar--the teaching of the foreign tongue (as nature teaches every
tongue, and much more speedily and more perfectly than art ever
succeeds in doing) by the ear rather than by the eye, and by means of
things rather than of books.

Petty makes no mention in his own narrative either of his multiplying
pen or of his pamphlet; indeed, that account is for the most part
confined to a detail of the progress of his pecuniary circumstances.
He is stated to have entered himself a student at Brazennose College,
Oxford, at the time the loyalists were ejected from the university by
the parliamentary visitors, which was in April, 1648. He was created a
Doctor of Physic on the 7th of March, 1649. In his own account, after
noticing his return to England with ten pounds more than he had
carried abroad, he proceeds:--"With this seventy pounds and by
endeavours, in less than four years more I obtained my degree of M.D.
in Oxford, and forthwith thereupon to be admitted into the College of
Physicians, London; and into several clubs of the virtuous; after all
which expenses defrayed, I had left twenty-eight pounds; and in the
next two years, being made Fellow of Brazennose, and Anatomy Professor
in Oxford, and also Reader at Gresham College, I advanced my said
stock to about 400_l._, and, with 100_l._ more advanced and given me
to go for Ireland, unto full 500_l._" It is said to have been on a
parliamentary recommendation that he obtained his Fellowship. The date
of his admission to the College of Physicians is given as the 25th of
June, 1650. He had before this been made deputy to Doctor Thomas
Clayton, the Professor of Anatomy at Oxford, who laboured under a
singular disqualification for the office he held, having, it seems, an
insurmountable aversion to the sight of a mangled corpse. It was while
he occupied this situation that Petty was principally instrumental in
bringing about the revival of Anne Green, who was hanged at Oxford on
the 14th of December, 1650, perhaps the most extraordinary instance of
the restoration of suspended animation on record. She had not only
been hanged by the neck for nearly half an hour, but both during that
time and after she was taken down she had been subjected to all sorts
of rough and violent usage by her friends with the view of putting her
out of pain, and extinguishing any possible remains of life.
Yet she perfectly recovered. "I myself," says Derham, in his
_Physico-Theology_, "saw her many years after that. She had, I heard,
borne divers children." At last Doctor Clayton resigned; and on the
1st of January, 1651, Petty became Anatomical Professor. On the 7th of
February in the same year he succeeded Dr. Knight in the Professorship
of Music in Gresham College, an appointment for which he is said to
have been mainly indebted to the interest of his friend Captain John
Graunt, well known for his attention to political arithmetic, and for
his 'Observations upon the Bills of Mortality,' which were published
ten years after this time, and in which he was assisted by Petty.[F]
By the _virtuous_, into several of whose clubs he tells us he was
admitted, Petty means only what we should now call the _Virtuosi_. He
was one of the members of the Oxford branch of the association,
originally formed in London about the year 1645, out of which
eventually rose the Royal Society. The Oxford philosophers joined
their London friends whenever any of them happened to be in the
metropolis; but they had also their own regular meetings, which appear
to have commenced about 1649 or 1650, when Dr. Wilkins, Dr. Wallis,
and other leading members of the original London body were removed to
appointments in the University. At Oxford they were joined by Dr. Seth
Ward, Dr. Ralph Bathurst, and Dr. Thomas Willis, as well as by Petty;
and it is recorded that they met at first in Dr. Petty's lodgings,
which were in the house of an apothecary, for the convenience of
obtaining such drugs or chemical substances as they might have
occasion to use or inspect. Petty appears to have continued to reside
principally at Oxford so long as he remained in England.

In the latter part of the year 1652, however, he was appointed Physician
to the army in Ireland; and, taking his departure for that country, he
landed at Waterford on the 10th of September. This post he retained till
June, 1659, at a salary of twenty shillings a day, while he gained by
his practice 400_l._ a year more. About September, 1654, perceiving, he
tells us, that the admeasurement of the lands forfeited by the late
rebellion was most insufficiently and absurdly managed, he obtained a
contract, dated 11th December, 1654, for performing the said
admeasurement, by which he gained above 9000_l._; "which," he adds,
"with the 500_l._ above mentioned, my salary of 20_s._ per diem, the
benefit of my practice, together with 600_l._ given me for directing an
after-survey of the adventurers' land, and 800_l._ more for two years'
salary as Clerk of the Council, raised me an estate of about 13,000_l._
in ready and real money, at a time when, without art, interest, or
authority, men bought as much land for ten shillings in real money as in
this year, 1685, yields ten shillings per annum rent above his majesty's
quit-rents." With part of this money he bought soldiers' debentures,
with the produce of which he afterwards bought lands in Ireland that
produced him a rental, Aubrey says, of 18,000_l._ a year, of the greater
part of which however he was deprived after the Restoration by the Court
of Nocents, or Innocents, which found that many of the persons to whom
the lands had originally belonged had not taken part in the rebellion of
1641, and consequently that the lands were not forfeited. Petty, we
suppose, would get back his purchase-money; but that would be a scanty
compensation. And possibly even that might be withheld, on the plea that
he had no claim except against the defunct illegal government. With
another portion of his 13,000_l._ he bought the Earl of Arundel's house
and garden in Lothbury, London, and erected upon their site the
buildings forming Tokenhouse-yard, which however were for the most part
destroyed some years afterwards by the Great Fire. It was Henry Cromwell
who gave him his place of Clerk of the Council in 1657, having already
on his first coming over as Lord-Lieutenant, two years before, made him
his secretary.

He returned to England early in 1659. It is affirmed to have been
again by the interest of his friend the Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland
that he was returned for the borough of West Looe, in Cornwall, to the
parliament called by Richard Cromwell, which met on the 27th of
January in that year. He had not yet taken his seat when, on the 25th
of March, six articles of impeachment were exhibited against him by
Sir Hierome Sankey, member for Woodstock, for his proceedings in
connexion with the distribution and allotment of Irish forfeited
lands; upon which he was summoned to attend the House that day month.
He made his appearance on the 19th of April, and the charges were
discussed on the 21st; but, the parliament being suddenly dissolved on
the day following, no decision was come to. In a letter to Thurloe,
then principal secretary of state, dated the 11th of April, Henry
Cromwell writes in terms which strongly show how high Petty stood in
his regard. "I have heretofore," he says, "told you my thoughts of Dr.
Petty, and am still of the same opinion; and, if Sir Hierome Sankey do
not run him down with numbers and noise of adventurers, and such other
like concerned persons, I believe the parliament will find him as I
have represented. He has curiously deceived me these four years if he
be a knave." Aubrey affirms that Petty and Sankey, whom he calls one
of Oliver's knights, and who, he says, was wont to preach at Dublin,
"printed one against the other;" and Petty did publish a folio
pamphlet in 1659, entitled 'A Brief of Proceedings between Sir Hierome
Sankey and the author, with the State of the Controversy between
them;' and another in 1660, in octavo, entitled 'Reflections upon some
Persons and Things in Ireland, by Letter to and from Dr. Petty; with
Sir Hierome Sankey's Speech in Parliament.' Aubrey adds--"The knight
had been a soldier, and challenged Sir William to fight with him. Sir
William is extremely short-sighted, and, being the challengee, it
belonged to him to nominate place and weapon. He nominates, for the
place, a dark cellar, and the weapon to be a great carpenter's axe.
This turned the knight's challenge into ridicule, and so it came to
nought." The breaking up of the parliament, however, did not save
Petty. He returned to Ireland immediately; but, notwithstanding the
continued friendship and protection of the Lord-Lieutenant, steps were
taken to prosecute him by the English government, and he was removed
from all his public employments. The Restoration, however, came before
anything could be done; and Petty hastened to make friends with the
new government, which he seems to have had no difficulty in doing,
although he had figured as one of the members of Harrington's
republican Rota Club, which had continued to meet at Miles's
Coffee-House, in New Palace Yard, down to so recent a date as the 21st
of February in this same year. But Petty, who had come over again to
England in the latter part of 1659, had returned to Ireland soon after
Christmas, and he was still there when the Restoration took place.
Aubrey says, that, when he soon after came back to England, "he was
presently received into good grace with his majesty, who was mightily
pleased with his discourse." Having resigned his professorship in
Gresham College on the 8th of March, 1661, he was on the 19th of the
same month made one of the commissioners of the Court of Claims
relating to the Irish estates; and on the 11th of April he received
the honour of knighthood, together with the grant of a new patent
constituting him Surveyor-General for Ireland. Aubrey even affirms
that he received a patent creating him an Irish peer by the title of
Earl of Kilmore; "which," it is added, "he stifles during his life to
avoid envy, but his son will have the benefit of the precedency."
This, however, is perhaps only a dream of the gossiping antiquary; who
subjoins, in a note written after Petty's death, "I expected that his
son would have broken out a lord or earl, but it seems that he had
enemies at the court at Dublin, which out of envy obstructed the
passing of his patent."

Although he was not made a peer, however, Petty was made a member of
parliament, being returned this same year to the Irish House of Commons
for the borough of Eniscorthy. All the forfeited lands in Ireland of
which he had been possessed on the 7th of May, 1659, were confirmed to
him by the Act of Settlement passed in 1662. Upon the foundation of the
Royal Society in July, 1662, he was elected one of the first council;
and when the College of Physicians obtained its new charter the
following year, his name was published in the list of the Fellows,
although he had now left off practice. It was soon after this date that
he first produced his famous invention of a double-bottomed ship to sail
against wind and tide, which in July, 1664, made a successful passage
from Dublin to Holyhead and back again, but was lost in a violent storm
on a third attempt to cross the Irish Sea. The idea continued to occupy
him for some years; but he was obliged to admit at last that he could
make nothing of it. It appears, in fact, that although the new species
of ship performed wonders against wind and tide, before the wind it
refused to move at all. Such is stated to have been _one_ of its
defects--as if more would not have been superfluous.

In 1667, on Trinity Sunday, Sir William Petty married Elizabeth,
daughter of Sir Hardress Waller, of Castletown, in the county of
Limerick, Knight, and widow of Sir Maurice Fenton, Bart., described by
Aubrey as "a very beautiful and ingenious lady, brown, with glorious
eyes." He afterwards, he tells us, set up iron-works and
pilchard-fishing in Kerry, and opened the lead-mines and timber-trade
in the same county; by all which operations, together with some
advantageous bargains, and by living under his income, he in course of
time greatly increased his fortune.

It was during the remaining portion of his life that most of his
literary performances were published, and probably for the greater
part executed. Though none of them are of great magnitude, their
number is considerable. The principal are--'A Treatise of Taxes and
Contributions,' 4to., London, 1662, 1667, 1685, 1690 (for the first
time with the author's name), and 1769; a Latin Hexameter Poem
entitled 'Colloquium Davidis cum anima sua De Magnalibus Dei' (a
paraphrase of the 104th Psalm), folio, London, 1679, under the name of
_Cassid. Aureus Minutius_; 'Quantulumcunque, concerning Money,' 4to.,
1682; 'An Essay in Political Arithmetic concerning the Growth of the
City of London,' 8vo., London, 1682, 1686, and 1769; 'Observations
upon the Dublin Bills of Mortality in 1681, and the State of that
City,' 8vo., London, 1683, 1686, and 1769; 'Maps of Ireland,' folio,
1685; 'Two Essays in Political Arithmetic, concerning the People,
Housing, Hospitals, &c. of London and Paris,' 8vo., London, 1687;
'Five Essays in Political Arithmetic,' 8vo., London, 1687. He also
contributed several papers to the Philosophical Transactions. And
among other works of his writing not published till after his death
were, 'Political Arithmetic, or a Discourse concerning the Extent and
Value of Lands, People, Buildings, &c., as the same relates to every
Country in general, but more particularly to the Territories of his
Majesty of Great Britain, and his Neighbours of Holland, Zealand, and
France,' 8vo., 1690, 1755, and 1769; 'The Political Anatomy of
Ireland,' 8vo., London, 1691, 1719, and 1769 (in which two latter
editions it is entitled 'A Political Survey of Ireland'); and 'Verbum
Sapienti, or An Account of the Wealth and Expense of England,' drawn
up in 1666, and printed along with the last in all the editions.

Petty's _Quantulumcunque_, where he ventures into the region of what
is now called Political Economy, contains some ingenious and sound
remarks, but it does not show that he had seen much farther into the
true nature of money than his contemporaries. His reputation is not so
much that of a political economist as of a political arithmetician. By
Political Arithmetic is meant that subdivision of Political Economy
which is occupied with the calculation of the mere numerical results
of the powers and principles that regulate the progress of society. It
comprehends what we now call Statistics, but only as its substratum or
basis, or as furnishing the data for its operations and conclusions,
which have for the most part a reference rather to the future than to
the present. Even in this field Petty must be considered as rather an
ingenious than a very wise or profound speculator. But his views are
sometimes curious and interesting from their very boldness, not to say
extravagance and absurdity. One of his most remarkable tracts is his
'Essay in Political Economy concerning the Growth of the City of
London,' first published, as has been stated above, in 1682. It is the
more interesting inasmuch as some of the principal predictions
hazarded in it refer to almost the present time.

By the city of London, the author begins by stating, he means the old
city with the liberties thereof, Westminster, Southwark, and whatever
other houses in Middlesex and Surrey are contiguous to or within call
of those in any of these divisions of the metropolis proper. More
particularly, he includes the 97 parishes within the walls of London,
the 16 next without them, the 6 of Westminster, and the 14 outparishes
of Middlesex and Surrey; all which 133 parishes are comprehended
within the weekly Bills of Mortality.

The population of London at the date of his writing, 1682, he deduces
as being about 670,000; and he calculates that it doubles itself in
forty years. That of the rest of England and Wales on the other hand
he takes at 7,400,000, and conceives that it only doubles itself in
three hundred and sixty years. He then proceeds thus:--"Now, if the
City double its people in 40 years, and the present number be 670,000,
and if the whole territory be 7,400,000, and double in 360 years as
aforesaid; then,...it appears that anno 1842 the people of the City
will be 10,718,880, and those of the whole country but 10,917,389,
which is but inconsiderably more. Wherefore it is certain and
necessary that the growth of the City must stop before the said year
1842, and will be at its utmost height in the next preceding period,
_anno_ 1802, when the number of the City will be eight times its
present number, namely, 5,359,000; and when, besides the said number,
there will be 4,466,000 to perform the tillage, pasturage, and other
rural works necessary to be done without the said city."

It does not appear upon what grounds it is so confidently assumed that
the growth of the City must necessarily stop so soon as its population
becomes equal to that of the country. The remainder of the disquisition
is occupied with an examination of the question whether it would be best
that the metropolis should be only a seventh part of its then magnitude
or should become seven times greater than it then was.

But first our author indulges in some conjectures as to the causes of
the growth of London up to the time of his writing. "The causes," he
observes, "of its growth from 1642 to 1682, may be said to have been
as followeth; namely, from 1642 to 1650, that men came out of the
country to London to shelter themselves from the outrages of the civil
wars during that time; from 1650 to 1660, the royal party came to
London for their more private and inexpensive living; from 1660 to
1670, the king's friends and party came to receive his favours after
his happy restoration; from 1620 to 1680, the frequency of plots and
parliaments might bring extraordinary numbers to the City. But what
reasons to assign for the like increase from 1604 to 1642 I know not,
unless I could pick out some remarkable accident happening in each
part of the said period, and make that to be the cause of this
increase, as vulgar people make the cause of every man's sickness to
be what he did last eat. Wherefore, rather than so to say _quidlibet
de quolibet_, I rather quit even what I have above said to be the
cause of London's increase from 1642 to 1682, and put the whole upon
some natural and spontaneous benefits and advantage that men find by
living in great more than in small societies; and shall therefore seek
for the antecedent causes of this growth in the consequences of the
like, considered in greater characters and proportions." The facts
here mentioned may, as Petty himself is not indisposed to admit, have
had little to do with the increase of the population of London between
1642 and 1682, but they are still of some historic curiosity and
importance, taken simply by themselves as facts resting on
contemporary authority. And they have not been adverted to by the
professed historians of the time.

The most curious part of the speculation, however, is the exposition
of the advantages that would follow from London being seven times
greater than it then was. First: it is calculated that such a city,
containing 4,690,000 inhabitants, might easily stand upon a space of
ground of 10,500 acres, which is about equivalent to a circle of four
miles and a half in diameter, and less than fifteen miles in
circumference. Then, for the necessary supply of provisions, &c., "a
circle of ground of thirty-five miles semi-diameter," we are told,
"will bear corn, garden-stuff, fruits, hay, and timber for the
4,690,000 inhabitants of the said city and circle, so as nothing of
that kind need be brought from above thirty-five miles' distance from
the said city." "All live cattle and great animals," it is added, "can
bring themselves to the said city, and fish can be brought from the
Land's End and Berwick as easily as now. Of coals there is no doubt.
And for water twenty shillings per family, or six hundred thousand
pounds per annum in the whole, will serve this city, especially with
the help of the New River." It is then proposed that the
above-mentioned housing, and a border of ground of three-quarters of a
mile broad, should be encompassed with a wall and ditch of twenty
miles about, as strong as any in Europe, which, it is calculated,
would cost only about a million sterling, or about a penny in the
shilling of house-rent for one year; and it is asked, "What foreign
prince could bring an army from beyond seas able to beat, first, our
sea-forces, and next, with horse harassed at sea, to resist all the
fresh horse that England could make, and then conquer above a million
of men well united, disciplined, and guarded within such a wall,
distant everywhere three-quarters of a mile from the housing to elude
the grenadoes and great shot of the enemy?"

But foreign powers are not the only enemies to be provided against.
The exposition goes on:--"As to intestine parties and factions, I
suppose that 4,690,000 people united within this great city, could
easily govern half the said number stationed without it; and that a
few men in arms within the said city and wall could also easily govern
the rest unarmed, or armed in such a manner as the sovereign shall
think fit." It appears, then, to be taken for granted that the
inhabitants of the metropolis and the inhabitants of the rest of the
kingdom may be considered as natural enemies, or as constituting two
factions permanently opposed to one another, but at the same time each
perfectly united within itself. But, perhaps, the strangest part of
the scheme is the manner in which it is proposed that it might be made
to operate in strengthening the town and weakening the country through
the medium of religion. "As to uniformity in religion, I conceive,"
proceeds our author, "that if St. Martin's parish may (as it doth)
consist of about 40,000 souls, that this great city also may as well
be made but as one parish, with seven times one hundred and thirty
chapels; in which might not only be an uniformity of common prayer,
but in preaching also: for that a thousand copies of one judiciously
and authentically composed sermon might be every week read in each of
the said chapels, without any subsequent repetition of the same as in
the case of homilies. Whereas, in England (wherein are near ten
thousand parishes, in each of which upon Sundays, holidays, and other
extraordinary occasions there should be about one hundred sermons _per
annum_, making about a million of sermons _per annum_ in the whole),
it were a miracle if a million of sermons, composed by so many men,
and of so many minds and methods, should produce uniformity upon the
discomposed understandings of above eighty millions of hearers." This
last number is apparently a misprint: but the meaning of the passage
seems to be that, while the people of the City are to be, as it were,
compressed into a uniformity of faith by having one and the same
sermon preached every Sunday and holiday in all the churches, the
inhabitants of the country are to be purposely kept in a state of
division and distraction by being exposed to all the diversities and
discordance of doctrine that would naturally proceed from ten thousand
preachers all left unchecked to utter whatever their own discretion or
indiscretion might prompt. Surely nothing equally comical and absurd
was ever so gravely proposed before or since. The entire speculation,
indeed, it must be confessed, does not raise a very exalted idea of
its author as a thinker on such subjects. It is, throughout, more
like the speculation of a hermit in his cell, or of a girl in a
boarding-school, than that of either a philosopher or a man of large
practical faculty. And Petty may perhaps have had, after all, more of
the mere dexterity and quickness which go to the making of a fortune
than of the deeper sagacity, the comprehensive largeness of view, and
the far-reaching prescience which are necessary for either a
philosopher or a statesman.

He had no doubt, however, plenty of ready talent of various kinds. "He
can be an excellent droll," writes his friend Aubrey, "if he has a
mind to it, and will preach extempore incomparably, either the
Presbyterian way, Independent, Capucin friar, or Jesuit." And again,
"He is a person of an admirable inventive head, and practical parts.
He hath told me that he hath read but little, that is to say, not
since twenty-five _ætatis_, and is of Mr. Hobbes his mind, that, had
he read much, as some men have, he had not known so much as he does,
nor should have made such discoveries and improvements." But in truth,
Petty is not the author of any thing that can be called a discovery in
science or the arts. There was considerable resemblance between him
and his friend Hobbes in what we may call complexion of intellectual
character, however inferior Petty was in literary and philosophical
cultivation as well as in original mental power. Both in particular
had abundance of that self-confidence which may have been partly
innate, but was also strengthened in both by the accident of their
having been to a great extent self-educated; for it is evident that so
they must in reality have been, notwithstanding the formal attendance
of each for some time at the university.

The impression that Petty made in conversation may be gathered from
various passages in the Diary of Pepys, to whom he was also well known.
"At the coffee-house," Pepys writes under date of the 27th of January,
1664, "where I sat with Sir G. Askew and Sir William Petty, who in
discourse is, methinks, one of the most rational men that ever I heard
speak with a tongue, having all his notions the most distinct and
clear." Again, under the 18th of February, 1665, we read:--"At noon, to
the Royal Oak tavern in Lombard Street; where Sir William Petty and the
owners of the double-bottomed boat (the Experiment) did entertain my
Lord Brouncker, Sir R. Murray, myself, and others, with marrow-bones and
a chine of beef of the victuals they have made for this ship; and
excellent company and good discourse: but above all I do value Sir
William Petty." Many details about the double-bottomed boat are given by
Pepys. One passage is as follows:--"1st February, 1664. Thence to
Whitehall; where, in the duke's chamber, the king came and staid an hour
or two laughing at Sir W. Petty, who was there about his boat; and at
Gresham College in general: at which poor Petty was, I perceive, at some
loss; but did argue discreetly, and bear the unreasonable follies of the
king's objections and other bystanders with great discretion; and
offered to take odds against the king's best boats; but the king would
not lay, but cried him down with words only."

We must add Aubrey's description of Petty's personal appearance. "He
is," he writes, "a proper handsome man, measured six foot high, good
head of brown hair, moderately turning up; _vide_ his picture as
Doctor of Physic. His eyes are a kind of goose-grey, but very
short-sighted, and as to aspect beautiful, and promise sweetness of
nature, and they do not deceive, for he is a marvellous good-natured
person, and ευσπλαγχνος [Greek: eusplanchnos] [tender-bowelled].
Eye-brows thick, dark, and straight [horizontal]. His head is very
large, μακροκεφαλος [Greek: makrokephalos]. He was in his youth
slender, but, since these twenty years and more past, he grew very
plump, so that now, 1680, he is _abdomine tardus_ [heavy-paunched].
This last March, 1679-80, I persuaded him to sit for his picture to
Mr. Logan, the graver, whom I forthwith went for myself, and he drew
it first before his going into Ireland, and 'tis very like him. But
about 1659 he had a picture in miniature drawn by his friend and mine,
Mr. Samuel Cowper (prince of limners of his age), one of the likest
that ever he drew."

He went over to Ireland to take his seat in the parliament of that
kingdom on the 22nd of March, 1680. This is about the last thing that
is recorded of Petty. "He died," Aubrey relates, "at his house in
Piccadilly Street, almost opposite to St. James's Church, on Friday,
16th day of December, 1687, of a gangrene in his foot, occasioned by
the swelling of the gout." His remains were interred in the church of
his native town of Romsey, beside those of his father and mother; they
are covered by a flat stone, on which an illiterate workman has cut
the words "Here layes Sir William Pety."

He left a large fortune, perhaps the largest that up to that time had
ever been accumulated by an individual in England. "He hath told me,"
says Aubrey, "that he never got by legacies in his life but only ten
pounds, which was not paid. He hath told me that, whereas some men
have accidentally come into the way of preferment by lying at an inn,
and there contracting an acquaintance, on the road, or as some others
have done,--for example, my cousin Rowland Platts, whom the Lord
Cottington never having seen before, liked so well, that he made him
his gentleman of the horse when he went his embassy into Spain (this
was on ship-board)--he never had any such opportunity, but hewed out
his fortune himself." In the pamphlet which he published in 1660 in
his own defence against the charges of Sir Hierome Sankey, under the
title of 'Reflections upon some Persons and Things in Ireland,' Petty
has entered into some details upon the manner in which his property
was acquired which add something to the statement already quoted from
his will, with which they may be compared. "In the year 1649," he
says, "I proceeded M.D.; after the charges whereof, and my admission
into the College of London, I had left about 60_l._ From that time
till about August, 1652, by my practice, fellowships at Gresham, and
at Brazen-nose, and by my Anatomy Lecture at Oxford, I had made that
60_l._ to be near 500_l._ From August 16, 1652, when I went for
Ireland, to December, 1654, when I began the survey and other public
entanglements, with 100_l._ advance money, and 365_l._ a year
well-paid salary, as also with my practice among the chief in the
chief city of the nation, I made my said 500_l._ above 1600_l._ Now
the interest of this 1600_l._ for a year in Ireland could not be less
than 200_l._, which, with 550_l._ for another year's salary and
practice, namely, until the lands were set out in October, 1655, would
have increased my said stock to 2350_l._; with 2000_l._ whereof I
would have bought 8000_l._ in debentures, which would then have
purchased me about 15,000 acres of land, namely, as much as I am now
accused to have. These 15,000 acres could not yield me less than, at
2_s._ per acre, 1500_l._ per annum, especially receiving the rents of
May-day preceding. This year's rent, with 550_l._ for my salary and
practice, &c., till December, 1656, would have brought me even then
(debentures growing dearer) 6000_l._ in debentures, whereof the
five-sevenths then paid would have been about 4000_l._ neat, for which
I must have had about 8000 acres more, being as much almost as I
conceive is due to me. The rent for 15,000 acres and 8000 acres for
three years could not have been less than 7000_l._, which, with the
same three years' salary, namely, 1650_l._, would have been near
9000_l._ estate in money, above the above-mentioned 1500_l._ per annum
in lands. The which, whether it be more or less than what I now have,
I leave to all the world to examine and judge. This estate I might
have got without ever meddling with surveys, much less with the more
fatal distribution of lands after they were surveyed, and without
meddling with the clerkship of the council, or being secretary to the
Lord-Lieutenant; all which had I been so happy as to have declined,
then had I preserved an universal favour and interest with all men,
instead of the odium and persecution I now endure." Petty's actual
acquisitions, however, came at length far to exceed the amount
insinuated in this hypothetical statement. If we may rely upon the
account of his friend Aubrey, the lands in Ireland that remained to
him in 1680, after he had been forced by the Court of Innocents to
relinquish the greater part of what he had once possessed, produced a
rental of 7000_l._ or 8000_l._ per annum, and he could from Mount
Mangorto, in the county of Kerry, behold 50,000 acres of his own
property.

In his will (made in 1685) Petty states his revenue from property in
Ireland without the county of Kerry, in lands, remainders, and
reversions, to be then about 3100_l._ per annum; and he adds, "I have
of neat profits out of the lands and woods of Kerry, above 1100_l._
per annum, besides iron-works, fishing, and lead-mines, and
marble-quarries, worth 600_l._ per annum; in all 4800_l._" Altogether
he makes his real estate to amount to about 6700_l._ per annum. The
total of his personal estate he sets down at 46,412_l._; so that,
including what he calls demonstrable improvements of his Irish
estates, he considers that he may leave behind him about 15,000_l._
per annum in all. This is after making allowance for a loss of
25,000_l._ upon twice that amount of debts which he calls doubtful,
and of 3200_l._ upon 4000_l._ of bad or nearly desperate debts. To his
wife he leaves 1587_l._ per annum, with 9000_l._ in money; advising
her to spend the whole of her income "on her own entertainments,
charity, and munificence, without care of increasing her children's
fortunes." To his daughter he leaves in all 20,000_l._; the rest of
his estate he divides for the greater part between his two sons, upon
the general principle of making the income of the elder about twice
that of the younger. The legacies are few and of inconsiderable
amount. "As for legacies for the poor," he says, "I am at a stand; as
for beggars by trade and election, I give them nothing; as for
impotents by the hand of God, the public ought to maintain them; as
for those who have been bred to no calling nor estate, they should be
put upon their kindred; as for those who can get no work, the
magistrates should cause them to be employed, which may be well done
in Ireland, where is fifteen acres of improvable land for every head;
prisoners for crimes, by the king; for debts, by their prosecutors; as
for those who compassionate the sufferings of any object, let them
relieve themselves by relieving such sufferers, that is, give them
alms _pro re nata_, and for God's sake relieve those several species
above mentioned where the above-mentioned obligers fail in their
duties: wherefore I am contented that I have assisted all my poor
relations, and put many into a way of getting their own bread, and
have laboured in public works, and by inventions have sought out real
objects of charity; and do hereby conjure all who partake of my estate
from time to time to do the same, at their peril. Nevertheless, to
answer custom, and to take the surer side, I give 20_l._ to the most
wanting of the parish wherein I die." There are no such bequests as
according to Pepys had been in a previous will made by Petty. Under
date of the 22nd of March, 1665, Pepys notes:--"Sir William Petty did
tell me that in good earnest he hath in his will left some part of his
estate to him that could invent such and such things. As, among
others, that could discover truly the way of milk coming into the
breasts of a woman; and he that could invent proper characters to
express to another the mixture of relishes and tastes. And says, that
to him that invents gold he gives nothing for the philosopher's stone;
for, says he, they that find out that will be able to pay themselves.
But, says he, by this means it is better than to go to a lecture; for
here my executors, that must part with this, will be sure to be well
convinced of the invention before they do part with their money." Most
probably Petty in making these communications was only playing off
some of his drollery upon his temptingly mystifiable friend.

The remainder of the real will is also very characteristic. "As for
the education of my children," it continues, "I would that my daughter
might marry in Ireland, desiring that such a sum as I have left her
might not be carried out of Ireland. I wish that my eldest son may get
a gentleman's estate in England, which, by what I have gotten already,
intend to purchase, and by what I presume he may have with a wife, may
amount to between 2000_l._ and 3000_l._ per annum, and by some office
he may get there, together with an ordinary superlucration, may
reasonably be expected; so as I may design my youngest son's trade and
employment to be the prudent management of our Irish estate for
himself and his elder brother, which I suppose his said brother must
consider him for. As for myself, I being now about threescore and two
years old, I intend to attend the improvement of my lands in Ireland,
and to get in the many debts owing unto me; and to promote the trade
of iron, lead, marble, fish, and timber, whereof my estate is capable;
and, as for studies and experiments, I think now to confine the same
to the anatomy of the people and political arithmetic, as also to the
improvement of ships, land-carriages, guns, and pumps, as of most use
to mankind, not blaming the studies of other men. As for religion, I
die in the profession of that faith and in the practice of such
worship as I find established by the law of my country, not being able
to believe what I myself please, nor to worship God better than by
doing as I would be done unto, and observing the laws of my country,
and expressing my love and honour to Almighty God by such signs and
tokens as are understood to be such by the people with whom I live,
God knowing my heart even without any at all. And thus begging the
Divine majesty to make me what he would have me to be both as to faith
and good works, I willingly resign my soul into his hands, relying
only on his infinite mercy and the merits of my Saviour for my
happiness after this life, where I expect to know and see God more
clearly than by the study of the Scriptures and his works I have been
hitherto able to do. Grant me, O Lord, an easy passage to thyself,
that, as I have lived in thy fear, I may be known to die in thy
favour. Amen."

By his widow, who survived him about twenty years, dying in February,
1708, Sir William Petty had three sons and a daughter--"very lovely
children, but all like the mother," says Aubrey; who moreover adds in
a note, "He hath a natural daughter that much resembles him, no
legitimate child so much, that acts at the Duke's Playhouse, who hath
had a child by . . . about 1679. She is (1680) about twenty-one." Of
the three sons, John, the first-born, died in infancy. On the 6th of
December, 1688, within a year after the death of her husband, Lady
Petty was created Baroness of Shelburne, in the Irish peerage, for
life; and at the same time Petty's eldest son was made Baron of
Shelburne, also in the peerage of Ireland, with limitation however to
the heirs male of his own body. They were the two last creations made
by King James II. before the transference of the crown. Both the new
lord and his mother, however, deserted James as soon as he was driven
from the throne; their estates were consequently sequestered by the
Irish parliament, but they were recovered on the complete
establishment of the new government. Lord Shelburne died in 1696
without issue, on which the title became extinct. In 1699 the title
was restored by King William to his surviving brother Henry, who in
1719 was further elevated by George I. to the dignities of Viscount
Dunkerron and Earl of Shelburne in the peerage of Ireland; but he also
died, in April, 1751, without surviving issue--he had lost the last of
several sons about six months before--on which the titles again became
extinct. Meanwhile his sister Anne had in January, 1692, been married
to Thomas Fitzmaurice, twenty-first Baron Kerry, and first Earl of
Kerry, by whom, besides William, second Earl of Kerry, she had another
son who grew up, John; and to him his uncle the Earl of Shelburne left
his estates in the county of Kerry, which are stated to have amounted
to above 86,000 acres, or upwards of 135 square miles of English
statute measure. This John Fitzmaurice immediately assumed the name of
Petty, and was in the same year, 1751, created Baron Dunkerron,
Viscount Fitzmaurice, and Earl of Shelburne, in the peerage of
Ireland, and in 1760 was made Baron Wycombe, of Chipping Wycombe, in
that of England. His eldest son William, Earl of Shelburne, who was
one of the most distinguished political figures of the latter part of
the last century, was created Viscount Calne, Earl of Wycombe, and
Marquess of Lansdowne, in the British peerage, in 1784. The first
Marquess of Lansdowne, who died in 1805, was succeeded by his eldest
son John, who died without issue in 1809; and he was succeeded by his
half-brother Henry, now Marquess of Lansdowne, who also in 1818
succeeded to the Irish earldom of Kerry, with the ancient Barony of
Kerry, dating from the reign of King John, and who is, it appears from
this deduction, the great-great-grandson of Sir William Petty.

[Footnote F: Burnet (in his _Own Times_, i. 231) goes the length of
asserting that the Observations were written by Petty, and published
by him under the name of Graunt, who, it seems, was a Papist, and is
suspected by the bishop to have had some hand in the Great Fire of
1666.]




[Illustration: SYDENHAM

MAGDALEN OXFORD]


The celebrated physician, Thomas Sydenham, in many respects the most
eminent that England has produced, was born in the year 1624, at
Wynford-Eagle, in Dorsetshire, where his father, William Sydenham,
enjoyed a considerable estate. The mansion in which he was born is now
converted into a farm-house, and stands on the property of Lord Wynford.

In the year 1642, when eighteen, he was admitted as a commoner at
Magdalen-Hall, Oxford; but quitted it in the same year, when that city
became the headquarters of the royal army, after the battle of
Edgehill. He was probably induced to take this step by reasons of a
political nature; for we find that his family were active adherents of
the opposite party. Indeed he is said, though on doubtful authority,
to have held a commission himself under the parliament during his
absence from Oxford; and his elder brother, William, is known to have
attained considerable rank in the republican army, and held important
commands under the protectorate.

The political bias of his family is not without interest, as affording
a probable explanation of some circumstances in his life which would
otherwise be rather unaccountable--such as the fact that though he
reached the first eminence as a practising physician, he was never
employed at court, and was slighted by the college, who invested him
with none of their honours, nor even advanced him to the fellowship,
though a licentiate of their body, and qualified by the requisite
university education.

When Oxford was surrendered to the parliament, in 1646, Sydenham
determined to resume his academical studies; and passing through
London on his way, he met accidentally with Dr. Thomas Coxe, a
physician of some repute at that time, who was attending his brother.
The choice of a profession became the subject of a conversation
between them, which determined him in favour of medicine; for, in a
letter addressed to Dr. Mapletoft, thirty years after this time, which
forms the preface to one of his writings, he refers with much warmth
to this conversation as the origin of his professional zeal, and,
consequently, of whatever useful advances he had made in medicine.
Thus his success, both in the practice and reformation of his art, may
show the advantage of waiting till the faculties are fully matured,
before they are exercised in a study which requires independence as
well as vigour in thinking: for the circumstances of his family being
sufficiently affluent to place him above the necessity of choosing a
profession early, he had not turned his attention to physic till of an
age at which the medical education is generally almost completed. We
are not, however, to believe in the justice of an accusation brought
against him, that he had never studied his profession till he began to
practise it; for though we do not know what particular line of study
he pursued on his return to Oxford, it is clear from many passages in
his works that he had studied the writings of the ancient physicians
with no common care; and as his own show no defect of acquaintance
with whatever real information had been collected before his time, we
may reasonably conclude that this contemporary censure was mistaken or
malicious. He certainly held the opinions of his modern predecessors
in very little respect, for he does not often mention them, even for
the purpose of confutation; and in the letter to Dr. Mapletoft already
referred to, he says that he had found the best, and, in fact, the
only safe guide, through the various perplexities he had met within
his practice, to be the method of actual observation and experiment
recommended by Lord Bacon. This sentiment is often repeated in his
works; but it surely does not countenance the idea that he had begun
to practise without endeavouring to make what preparation he could, or
would have had others follow such an example; for the charge against
him goes to this length. The notion might arise from a foolish
anecdote related by his admirer, Sir Richard Blackmore, of his having
recommended Don Quixote as the best introduction he knew to the
practice of medicine, which Sydenham must have intended as a jest, or
perhaps as a sarcasm on the narrator himself.

At Oxford he formed a close friendship with John Locke, better known
afterwards as a philosopher than as a physician. Their intimacy, which
lasted to the end of Sydenham's life, probably contributed not a
little to give form to the disgust which he soon displayed at the
unsatisfactory and fluctuating state of medical opinion, and to the
zeal with which he sought to establish it on surer grounds; for he
appeals, as to the highest authority, in confirmation of some of his
new views on the treatment of fever, to the approval of his
illustrious friend, who even paid him the compliment of prefixing a
eulogy in indifferent Latin verse to the treatise in which these views
are developed.

On the 14th of April, 1648, he took the degree of bachelor of
medicine, being then twenty-four years old; and in the same year
obtained a fellowship at All Souls College, by the interest of a
relation. The degree of doctor he subsequently took at Cambridge,
where, being among those who thought with him in politics, he
probably found himself more at his ease. After a visit of some length
to Montpellier, then considered the best practical school of medicine
on the Continent, he settled in Westminster, and soon after married.

His progress to eminence in his profession must have been unusually
rapid, which might be owing, in some measure, to the call for men of
good capacity to the more stirring scenes of civil strife; for at
thirty-six he had succeeded in establishing a first-rate reputation,
which he continued to sustain in spite of much hostility and
ill-health for upwards of twenty years.

He witnessed the breaking out of the plague in 1665, but when it
reached the house adjoining his own, he was induced to remove with his
family some miles out of town. Of this desertion of his post, however,
he seems to have repented; for he afterwards returned, and occupied
himself diligently in visiting the victims of that devastating malady,
and has left a short but interesting account of his opinions
respecting it, and of the treatment he adopted; for the comparative
success of which, he appeals to the physicians who had witnessed or
followed his practice.

At the age of twenty-five, though a man of remarkably temperate and
regular habits, he became afflicted with gout and stone, from which he
suffered extreme torment with great resignation and patience for the
rest of his life. Of course, he did not neglect the opportunity of
studying those diseases in his own person, and recording the result of
his observations. His account of gout, especially, is considered to be
a most accurate and able history of that disease.

He died, leaving a family, at his house in Pall-Mall, on the 29th of
December, 1689, in the sixty-sixth year of his age, and was buried in
the parish church of St. James, Westminster, where, in 1810, a tablet
was erected to his memory by the College of Physicians, who became, as
a body, tardily but fully convinced of his extraordinary merit and
eminent claims to the gratitude and respect of his profession.

He is said to have been a man of the most retiring and unobtrusive
disposition, and the utmost placidity of temper. In a biographical
sketch by Dr. Samuel Johnson, prefixed to an English edition of his
works by Swan, in 1742, it is remarked, that if he could not teach us
in his writings how to cure the painful disorders from which he
suffered, he has taught us by his example the nobler art to bear them
with serenity. Nor was he less patient of mental than of bodily
inflictions; for though he was the object of much asperity among the
physicians of his time, he made no reprisals upon the reputations of
those who slandered him: though he often speaks of their bitterness,
he never even mentions their names--a forbearance to which, as his
biographer pungently remarks, they are indebted for their escape from
a discreditable immortality. His writings breathe throughout a spirit
of warm piety, candour, and benevolence: he is said to have been
extremely generous in his dealings with his patients; for which, with
other reasons, his practice though large was not very gainful, and he
did not leave much wealth behind him. He never was sought after by the
great, like his successor and disciple Radcliffe; and had none of the
talents by which that singular man was able to push his fortune and
establish a kind of professional despotism. Yet whatever medical skill
the latter evinced seems to have been derived from Sydenham, whose
doctrines and treatment he contrived to bring into a much more early
and general repute in England than they would probably have otherwise
obtained. Each had his reward: the one will be long remembered as the
founder of a magnificent library; the other can never be forgotten as
the author of modern medicine.

The bent of Sydenham's mind was eminently practical; he thought that
the business of a physician is to acquire an accurate knowledge of the
causes and symptoms of diseases, and the effects of different remedies
upon them; that, if he cannot prevent them, he may at least recognise
them with certainty, and apply with promptitude the means most likely
to cure them: with Hippocrates and the ancient empirical physicians,
whose tenets he professed to follow, he condemned all curious
speculations upon the intimate nature of disease, as incapable of
proof, and therefore always useless and often hurtful; and maintained
that the only trustworthy source of opinion in medicine is experience
resulting from observations frequently repeated, and experiments
cautiously varied; and that no theories worth attention can be framed
until the recorded experience of many observers, under many different
circumstances, and even through successive ages, shall be embodied
into one general system; and he boldly declared his belief that every
acute disease might then be cured. An instance, which unfortunately as
yet stands alone in support of this rather sanguine expectation, may
be taken from the history of small-pox. The observation of its
contagious nature led to the general practice of inoculation, and this
to the immortal discovery of Jenner, by which a disease but yesterday
the scourge of the earth has been almost extinguished. It is
remarkable that Sydenham, who first pointed out the important
difference between its distinctive and confluent forms--who so
materially improved the treatment by changing it from stifling to
cooling--and who studied and has described it with a laborious
accuracy hardly paralleled in the history of medicine--was not aware
of this, to us, its most striking characteristic of contagion. A
person conversant with such subjects will feel no surprise at this: to
the general reader it may be a sufficient explanation, that it lies
dormant for ten days; and that as it can only be taken once, and was
always prevalent in London, the number of persons susceptible at any
given time, and in obvious communication with each other, were
comparatively few; so that opportunities were not so likely to arise
as might be imagined of tracing its progress in single families or
neighbourhoods from one source of contagion.

Sydenham is justly celebrated for the happiness of his descriptions, and
his skilful application of simple methods of cure, which are as
effectual as they were novel in that age, when a medical prescription
sometimes contained a hundred different substances; but he has merit of
a higher kind, as a discoverer of general laws. Among others, he was
the first to notice that there is a uniformity in the fevers prevailing
at any one time, which is subject to periodical changes; and that other
acute diseases often partake largely of the same general character, and
sometimes even merge in it altogether, as the plague is said to have
swallowed up all other diseases. This, which he ascribed to some
peculiar state of the atmosphere, he called its epidemic constitution;
and to be aware of its vicissitudes must of course be very important to
the physician as a guide to practice. The value of these laws, which
Sydenham deduced from a multitude of observations, has been attested by
almost every medical writer since his time.

Sydenham's works have been repeatedly printed in the original Latin,
as well as in English and the Continental languages. His first work
was published after he had been sixteen years in practice; the last,
which he edited himself, is dated three years before his death; and an
elegant compendium of his experience was published posthumously by his
son. They all appear to have been extorted by the importunity of his
friends or the misrepresentations of his enemies. It is said that they
were composed in English, and translated into Latin by his friends
Mapletoft and Havers: there is, however, little reason for attaching
credit to this report, as we are assured, on the authority of Sir Hans
Sloane, who knew him well, that Sydenham was an excellent classical
scholar, and perfectly capable of expressing himself elegantly in
Latin. They are most carefully written and clearly expressed, and bear
marks of the utmost truth and impartiality in the narration of facts,
and judgment in arranging them. They are not voluminous, as he
studiously refrained from overloading them with trivial matter, and
from entering into the detail of a greater number of cases than might
be sufficient to illustrate his method of practice. His object was to
confine himself to the results of his own observation: to this he
pretty strictly adhered, so that little space is occupied in his
writings by quotations or criticism. It must be admitted that he
occasionally lapses into theoretical discussion, in violation of his
own principles; but as he seldom or never permitted his fancy to
divert him from what was practically useful, he may be pardoned if, in
that age of speculation, he could not entirely resist the seduction. A
graver charge against him is, that he overlooked or undervalued the
immense body of information to be obtained from examining the effects
of diseased actions after death, and devoted himself too exclusively
to the study of the symptoms during life, and the effect of remedies
upon them. It is hardly a sufficient justification of a man of so much
independence of spirit to reply, that such examinations were opposed
by the prejudices of the age in which he lived. Others have overcome
the same obstacles, and with them many of those difficulties which
perplexed and misled even the mind of Sydenham. He had equal or
greater difficulties to contend against in the deep-rooted absurdities
of the chemical and mechanical schools, which in the early part of his
life held an almost equally divided sway in medicine: the former
originated with Paracelsus and his disciples, and had the advantage of
a longer prescription; and the latter had received a fresh accession
of strength from the recent discoveries of Harvey: both, however, gave
way before his energetic appeal to fact and experience. Scarcely less
credit is due to him for his successful opposition to the popular
superstition in favour of a host of futile remedies, which are now
happily consigned to oblivion with the family receipt-books and
herbals in which their virtues were paraded, than for his victory over
false principles and dangerous rules of practice.

On the whole, it may be safely advanced that medicine, as a practical
science, owes more to the closely-printed octavo, in which the results
of his toilsome exertions are comprised, than to any other single
source of information.




[Illustration: BOYLE]


Robert Boyle was the seventh son of Richard Boyle, earl of Cork, and
his wife Catherine, only daughter of Sir Geoffry Fenton, secretary of
state for Ireland. There were fifteen children of this marriage, and
the subject of this memoir (the fourteenth) was born on the 25th of
January, 1626, at Lismore, in the province of Munster. His sister
Catherine, by marriage Lady Ranelagh, afterwards mentioned, was
considerably older, having been born on the 22nd of March, 1614.

The autobiography and correspondence of Robert Boyle have been almost
entirely forgotten in the superior fame which he has attained in
chemistry and medicine. If we consider the position in which he stands
among our philosophers, it will not appear superfluous, having his own
words to quote, if we give the account of his earlier years at some
length. The narration in question (in which he calls himself
Philaretus, and writes in the third person) is prefixed to Dr. Birch's
edition of his works in 5 vols. fol., which we here cite once for
all--'The Works of the Hon. Robert Boyle, in five volumes, to which is
prefixed a Life of the Author,' London, printed for A. Millar, 1744.
Of his birth and station he says, "that it so suited his inclinations
and designs, that, had he been permitted an election, his choice would
scarce have altered God's assignment." His father, having "a perfect
aversion for their fondness, who use to breed their children so nice
and tenderly that a hot sun or a good shower of rain as much endangers
them as if they were made of butter or of sugar," committed him to a
nurse away from home, under whose care he formed a vigorous
constitution. He lost his mother at an early age, this being one
"great disaster;" the other was the acquisition of a habit of
stuttering, which came upon him from mocking other children. He was
taught early to speak both French and Latin, and his studiousness and
veracity endeared him to his father, "and indeed lying was a vice both
so contrary to his nature, and so inconsistent with his principles,
that as there was scarcely anything he more greedily desired than to
know the truth, so was there scarcely anything he more perfectly
detested than not to speak it; which brings into my mind a foolish
story I have heard him jeered with by his sister, my Lady Ranelagh,
how she having given strict order to have a fruit-tree preserved for
his sister-in-law, the Lady Dungarvan, he accidentally coming into the
garden, and ignoring the prohibition, did eat half a score of them,
for which being chidden by his sister Ranelagh (for he was yet a
child), and being told by way of aggravation that he had eaten half a
dozen plums, 'Nay, truly, sister,' answers he simply to her, 'I have
eaten half a score.'" At eight years old he was sent to Eton with his
elder brother, the provost being Sir Henry Wotton, "a person that was
not only a fine gentleman himself, but very well skilled in the art of
making others so." Here he was placed under the immediate care of Mr.
Harrison, one of the masters, and became immoderately fond of study
from "the accidental perusal of Quintus Curtius, which first made him
in love with other than pedantic books." He always declared that he
was more indebted to this author than was Alexander, the hero of the
work. Two years afterwards, during an attack of the ague, the Romance
of Amadis de Gaule was put into his hands "to divert his melancholy,"
and by this and other such works his habit of persevering study was
weakened. He was obliged afterwards systematically to conquer the ill
effects of this mental regimen, and "the most effectual way he found
to be the extraction of the square and cube roots, and especially
those more laborious operations of algebra which so entirely exact the
whole man, that the smallest distraction or heedlessness constrains us
to renew our trouble, and re-begin the operation." 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.

His father about the close of the year 1637 came to England, and
settled at Stalbridge, in Dorsetshire; and Robert Boyle was soon after
removed from Eton to his father's house, and placed under the tuition
of the rector of the parish. In the autumn of 1638 he was sent to
travel with an elder brother, under the care of M. Marcombes, a
Frenchman, of whom he says, with many other encomia, that "if he were
given to any vice himself, he was careful by sharply condemning it to
render it uninfectious." "The worst quality he had was his choler; and
that being the only passion to which Philaretus was much observed to
be inclined, his desire to shun clashing with his governor, and his
accustomedness to bear the sudden sallies of his impetuous humour,
taught our youth so to subdue that passion in himself, that he was
soon able to govern it habitually and with ease." It had been intended
that he should have served in a troop of horse which his elder brother
had raised, but the illness of another brother prevented this. He
visited France and Switzerland, and settled with his governor at
Geneva, for the prosecution of his studies. The only incident which
we shall mention as occurring during this period, is one which may be
thought by many scarcely worthy of notice. Boyle himself used to speak
of it as the most considerable accident of his whole life; and for its
influence upon his life it ought not to be omitted. While staying at
Geneva he was waked in the night by a thunder-storm of remarkable
violence. Taken unprepared and startled, it struck him that the day of
judgment was at hand; "whereupon," to use his own words, "the
consideration of his unpreparedness to welcome it, and the hideousness
of being surprised by it in an unfit condition, made him resolve and
vow, that if his fears that night were disappointed, all further
additions to his life should be more religiously and watchfully
employed." He has been spoken of as being a sceptic before this sudden
conversion. This does not appear from his own account, further than as
any boy of fourteen may be so called, who has never taken the trouble
fully to convince himself of those truths which he professes to
believe. He carried his theological studies to considerable depth. He
cultivated both Hebrew and Greek, though a professed hater of verbal
studies, that he might read the originals of the Scriptures. On this
subject he remarks in his manuscripts (Works, vol. i. pp. 29,
30)--"When I have come into the Jewish schools, and seen those
children that were never bred up for more than tradesmen, bred up to
speak (what hath been peculiarly called) God's tongue as soon as their
mother's, I have blushed to think how many gown-men, that boast
themselves to be the true Israelites, are perfect strangers to the
language of Canaan; which I would learn were it but to be able to pay
God the respect usual from civil inferiors to princes, with whom they
are wont to converse in their own languages. And I confess myself to
be none of those lazy persons that seem to expect to obtain from God
the knowledge of the wonders of his book upon as easy terms as Adam
did a wife, by sleeping profoundly, and having her presented to him at
his awaking."

In September, 1641, he left Geneva, and travelled in Italy, where he
employed himself in learning the language, and "in the new paradoxes
of the great stargazer Galileo, whose ingenious books, perhaps because
they could not be so otherwise, were confuted by a decree from Rome;
his highness the pope, it seems, presuming, and that justly, that the
infallibility of his chair extended equally to determine points in
philosophy as in religion, and loath to have the stability of that
earth questioned in which he had established his kingdom." Having seen
Florence, Rome, and Genoa, he came to Marseilles, and here his own
narrative ends. At Marseilles he was detained for want of money, owing
to the troubles in England; having, however, procured funds from his
governor, he returned to London, where he found (in 1644) his father
dead, and himself in possession of the manor of Stalbridge, with other
property. At that place he resided till 1650, not taking any part in
politics, and being in communication with men of influence in both
parties, whereby his property received protection from both. The
epistolary correspondence of Boyle is amusing, and furnishes one of
the earliest specimens of the lighter style. Considering the formality
of the age, and the then existing peculiarities of the English, the
extracts we give from a letter to Lady Ranelagh will appear original;
while the letter immediately following, written from Boyle when at
Eton to his father (stated in the 'Biog. Brit.' to be taken from the
original), will show the manners of the time:--

  "My most honoured Lord Father,

    "Heartily praying for the continuance of God's favor to your
    Lordship still in soul and body, I humbly prostrate myself unto
    your honorable feet, to crave your blessing and pardon for my
    remissness, in presenting my illiterate lines unto your honorable
    kind acceptance. Whereas I have been heretofore cloyed with our
    college exercise, I could not so often visit your Honour in
    writing; but now being by the ardent desire of our brother, and
    the licence of Sir Harry Wotton, and our schoolmaster, come to
    London, where we make four days' residence, have found
    opportunity to offer unto your Honour that oblation due unto so
    good and so noble a father, that is most humble duty: desiring
    your Honour to pardon him for his brevity, who strives to live
    after your Lordship's will and commandments.

  "London, decimo 4to Martii.

  "Truly and obediently,
  "ROBERT BOYLE."

Superscribed, "For my dear Lord Father, the Earl of Cork."

The following is a part of his account of his first journey to
Stalbridge, written to Lady Ranelagh, March 30, 1646:--

    "As we went along, we met divers little parties, with whom we
    exchanged fears, and found that the malignant humours which were
    then abroad had frightened the country into a shaking ague, till
    we got to Farnham, which we found empty and unguarded. With divers
    contemplations upon this subject, I went to supper, and thence to
    bed, not without some little fear of having our quarters beaten up
    by the cavaliers that night; when lo! to second my apprehensions,
    about the dead of my sleep, and that night, I heard a thundering
    at the door, as if they meant to fright it out of the hinges and
    us out of our wits. I presently leaped out of my bed, in my
    stockings and clothes (my usual night-posture when I travel), and
    while Roger was lighting a candle, got my Bilboa and other
    instruments from under my pillow; whereupon Roger opening the
    door, saw it beset with musketeers, who no sooner saw us, but said
    aloud that we were not the men they looked for; and being
    entreated to come into the chamber, refused it, and he that
    brought them thither excused their troubling us with as
    transcendent compliments as the brown bill could afford. I
    wondered at their courtesy till I knew that it was the town
    constable, that, making a search for some suspicious persons, and
    coming by my chamber, that wanted a lock, either had a mind to
    make us take notice of so considerable an officer, or no mind that
    we should sleep while our betters watched; and for his not coming
    in, some accents of fear that fell from him made me suspect I was
    obliged for that to myself; and I remember that just at the
    opening of the door, he, peeping in, espied me drawing a pistol
    out of one of my holsters, which I believe made him so niggardly
    of his company. The next day we dined at Winchester, and ever and
    anon, by the trembling passengers we met, were as nicely
    catechized concerning our ways, as if we were to be elected in the
    number of the new lay elders. From thence we reached Salisbury
    that night, though, before we came thither, we were fain to pass
    in the dark through a wood, where we had warning given us that
    about an hundred woodmen (we have got wild English too now) lay
    leiger, where these night-birds used to exercise their charity, in
    easing weary travellers of such burthensome things as money and
    portmanteaus. But coming nearer, and knowing the state's
    messenger, as he called himself, they durst not meddle neither
    with us nor with my trunks, which they eyed though very lovingly;
    and had we not been there, would, I believe, have opened to search
    for malignant letters, such as use to be about the king's picture
    in a yellow boy. I am loaded with civil language and fair
    promises; but I have always observed that in the trooper's
    dictionary the pages are so close and thick written with promises,
    that there is no room left for such a word as performance."

From this time to the end of his life he appears to have been engaged
in study. His chemical experiments date from 1646. He was one of the
first members of the _invisible college_, as he calls it, which has
since become the Royal Society. The rest of his public life is little
more than the history of his printed works, which are voluminous, and
will presently be further specified. He must have written with
singular rapidity, for an argumentative and elaborate letter, written,
as appears on the face of it, in the morning, previously to making his
preparations for a journey in the afternoon, is of a length which
would occupy more than a page of this work.

After various journeys to his Irish estates, he settled at Oxford in
1654, where he remained till 1668. That which especially directed him
to this place, besides its being generally suited to the prosecution
of all his literary and philosophical pursuits, was the presence of
that knot of learned men from whom the Royal Society took its rise. It
consisted of a few only, but those eminent: Bishop Wilkins, Wallis,
Ward, Wren, and others, who used to meet for the purpose of conferring
upon philosophical subjects, and mutually communicating and reasoning
on their respective experiments and discoveries. Here his life
('Works,' vol. i.) states him to have invented the air-pump, which is
not correct, though he made considerable improvements in it. On the
accession of Charles II. in 1660, he was much pressed to enter the
church, but refused, both as feeling the want of a sufficient vocation
towards that profession, and as desirous to add to his writings in
favour of Christianity all the force which could be derived from his
fortune not being interested in its defence. From this time forwards,
Boyle's life is not much more than the history of his works. It passed
in an even current of tranquil happiness, and diligent employment,
little broken, except by illness, from which he was a great sufferer.
At an early age, he was attacked by the stone, and continued through
life subject to paroxysms of that dreadful disease; and in 1670 he was
afflicted with a severe paralytic complaint, from which he fortunately
recovered without sustaining any mental injury. On the incorporation
of the Royal Society in 1663, he was named as one of the council in
the charter; and as he had been one of the original members, so
through his life he continued to publish his shorter treatises in
their Transactions. In 1662 he was appointed by the king Governor of
the Corporation for propagating the Gospel in New England. The
diffusion of Christianity was a favourite subject of exertion with him
through life. For the sole purpose of exerting a more effectual
influence in introducing it into India, he became a Director of the
East India Company; and, at his own expense, caused the Gospels and
Acts to be translated into Malay, and five hundred copies to be
printed and sent abroad. He also caused a translation of the Bible
into Irish to be made and published, at an expense of 700_l._; and
bore great part of the expense of a similar undertaking in the Welsh
language. To other works of the same sort he was a liberal
contributor; and as in speech and writing he was a zealous yet
temperate advocate of religion, so he showed his sincerity by a ready
extension of his ample funds to all objects which tended to promote
the religious welfare of his fellow-creatures.

In 1666 he left Oxford, and took up his abode with Lady Ranelagh, in
London. In this year his name appears as attesting the miraculous
cures (as they were called by many) of Valentine Greatraks, an
Irishman, who, by a sort of animal magnetism, made his own hands the
medium of giving many patients almost instantaneous relief. This
gentleman, Mr. Greatraks, a man of respectable family, and an Irish
magistrate (whose printed letter to Robert Boyle, besides being
accompanied by the testimonials of himself and others to facts, is, as
far as such a thing can be, evidence of good faith by its style and
documents), one day believed himself enabled by the power of God to
cure diseases by his touch, and whatever the cause might be, has left
sufficient evidence at least of this fact, that after his touch
inveterate diseases did shortly leave those who suffered from them.
Mr. Greatraks published his letter to Mr. Boyle in 1666, and some
remarks written in the fly-leaf of a copy we have seen will make a
good _resumé_ of the state of the evidence. "In looking over the cases
stated in this pamphlet, attested as they are by the most learned and
philosophical individuals of that period, it is impossible to deny the
existence of the facts as attested, without rejecting _in toto_ the
evidence of every historical record. Credulity may have distorted and
exaggerated the reality, as witnessed by such men even as Boyle,
Cudworth, Wilkins, Patrick, &c.; but, doubtless, the facts are
essentially true as reported, and as certainly to be accounted for on
the principle of mental and physical sympathy, the imagination of the
patient being wrought upon by the powerful emotions excited by
expectation. Half a hundred works of the most philosophical and
scientific physicians might be cited in confirmation of the
astonishing effects of that agitating excitement of the nervous system
produced by operating upon the imagination; which perfectly explains
all the wonders of animal magnetism." We may add that the phenomena
certainly witnessed at the tomb of the Jansenist Abbé Paris were not
better attested, and were less extraordinary in degree, than those in
question; and that, as we shall see, of all the men of his time,
Robert Boyle was peculiarly the one whose opinion it would have been
desirable to have. The reputation of Mr. Greatraks extended through
the three kingdoms, and Flamsteed, among others (Baily's 'Flamsteed,'
p. 12), was among the number of those who went to Ireland to be
touched, and calls himself "an eye-witness of several of his cures."
He also received benefit himself, but whether from the touch or from
subsequent sea-sickness, he is not certain, but judges from both. At
the same time, in illustration of what we shall presently have to say
on the distinction between Boyle as an eye-witness and Boyle as a
judge of evidence, we find him in 1669 not indisposed to receive, and
that upon the hypothesis implied in the words, the "true relation of
the things which an unclean spirit did and said at Mascon, in
Burgundy," &c. That he should have been inclined to prosecute
inquiries about the transmutation of metals needs no excuse,
considering the state of chemical knowledge in his day; and we find
even Newton inclined to fear, from the result of some experiments of
Boyle (the results of which only had been stated), and to speak in
time, as became one who should afterwards be master of the mint, a
word in favour of the currency. In a letter to Oldenburgh, dated 1676,
Newton writes thus: "But yet because the way by which mercury may be
so impregnated, has been thought fit to be concealed by others that
have known it, and may therefore possibly be an inlet to _something
more noble, not to be communicated without immense damage to the
world, if there should be any verity in the Hermetic writers_;
therefore I question not but that the great wisdom of the noble author
will sway him to high silence, till he shall be resolved of what
consequence the thing may be, either by his own experience, or the
judgment of some other that thoroughly understands what he speaks
about; that is, of a true Hermetic philosopher, whose judgment (if
there be any such) would be more to be regarded in this point, than
that of all the world besides to the contrary, there being other
things beside the _transmutation of metals_ (if these great pretenders
brag not) which none but they understand. Sir, because the author
seems desirous of the sense of others in this point, I have been so
free as to shoot my bolt; but, pray, keep this letter private to
yourself. Your servant, ISAAC NEWTON."

It appears that both Boyle and Newton were startled with the result of
the experiments of the former; and the treatment which old believers in
alchemy have experienced from the present age will render it no less
than just to say, that faith in alchemy now, and the same in the middle
of the seventeenth century, are two things so different in kind, that to
laugh at both in one shows nothing but the ignorance of the laugher.

In the year 1680 he was elected President of the Royal Society, a post
which he declined, as appears by a letter to Hooke ('Works,' i. p.
74), from scruples of conscience about the religious tests and oaths
required. In 1688 he advertised the public that some of his
manuscripts had been lost or stolen, and others mutilated by accident;
and in 1689, finding his health declining, he refused most visits, and
set himself to repair the loss. In that year, being still in a sort of
expectation that the alchemical project might succeed, he procured the
repeal of the statute 5 Hen. IV. "against the multiplying of gold or
silver," and, what was still more useful, the same statute contains a
provision that "no mine of copper, &c. shall be adjudged a royal mine,
although gold or silver may be extracted out of the same." In 1691 his
complaints began to assume a more serious character. Lady Ranelagh
died on the 23rd of December, and he followed her on the 30th of the
same month. He was buried at St. Martin's in the Fields, Jan. 7, 1692,
and a funeral sermon was preached on the occasion by Dr. Burnet, who
had long been his friend, and to the expenses of whose history of the
Reformation he had largely contributed.

Boyle was never married. In a letter to his niece, Lady Barrymore, on
a rumour of the kind, he says, "You have certainly reason, madam, to
suspend your belief of a marriage celebrated by no priest but Fame,
and made unknown to the supposed bridegroom: I shall therefore only
tell you that the little gentleman and I are still at the old
defiance. You have carried away too many of the perfections of your
sex, to leave enough in this country for the reducing so stubborn a
heart as mine, whose conquest were a task of so much difficulty, and
is so little worth it, that the latter property is always likely to
deter any that hath beauty and merit enough to overcome the former."
He was tall, slender, and emaciated; excessively abstemious in food,
and somewhat oppressed by low spirits: but at the same time of a
copiousness of conversation and wit which made Cowley and Davenant
rank him in that respect among the first men of his age. His
benevolence both in action and sentiment distinguished him from others
as much as his acquirements and experiments: and that in an age when
toleration was unknown. He constantly refused a peerage, though the
personal friend of three successive kings. He was always a moderate
adherent of the Church of England; nor is it recorded that he ever
attended any other place of worship, except once when he went to hear
Sir Henry Vane discourse at his own house, on which occasion he
entered into a discussion with the preacher. Finally, he was a man of
whom all spoke well. With such a character, it is not to be wondered
at if his private virtues were made to reflect a lustre upon his
scientific exploits which the latter could not have gained alone; the
more especially when it is considered that his contemporaries, who
viewed him as he was, and from their own position, had a right to
style his genius as one which produced results of the first order,
which could be but another way of saying that it was of the first
order itself. So indeed it has been understood: and we are accustomed
to talk of Bacon and Newton and Boyle together. The merits of Boyle
are indeed singular, and almost unprecedented; his discoveries are in
several cases of the highest utility: but we do not think the
inference that they were the result of a reasoning power, or a
distinctive sagacity, of the highest kind, would be correct. Coming
after Bacon, feeling all the beauty of his methods, disgusted with the
spirit of system, and strong beyond his contemporaries in common
sense, the same view of life which made him indifferent to the
political and religious disputes of his time, and content himself with
the knowledge and practice of the things which they all agreed in,
also regulated his views of philosophy; so that he tossed Laud and
Paracelsus on one side, Prynne and Des Cartes on the other, and began
to investigate for himself, on the simple principle of examining
closely and strictly relating what he saw. In this respect his
writings remind us strongly of those of Roger Bacon: they are full of
sensible views and experiments of his own, and of absurdities derived
from the relation of others. He leans too much, for one of our day, to
the attempt to discover the fundamental relations which touch close
upon the primary qualities of matter, instead of endeavouring to
connect and classify what he had actually observed. And what we
maintain is, that his discoveries do not show him to have that talent
for suggestion and power of perceiving points of comparison which is
the distinguishing attribute of the greatest discoverers. To take an
instance: in his experiments "showing how to make flame stable and
ponderable," he finds that various substances gain weight by being
heated. He states it then as proved that "either flame, or the
analogous effluxions of the fire, will be, what chemists would call,
corporified with metals or minerals exposed naked to its action." But
it never suggests itself to him, that the additional substance added
to the metal or mineral may be air, or a part of air.

When a character has been overrated in any respect, the discovery of
it is usually attended by what the present age calls a _reaction_:
the pendulum of opinion swings to the side opposite to that on which
it has been unduly brought out of its position of equilibrium. For
instance, in a very instructive discourse prefixed to the 'Supp.
Encyc. Britann.,' Mr. Brande speaks thus: "Boyle has left voluminous
proofs of his attachment to scientific pursuits, but his experiments
are too miscellaneous and desultory to have afforded either brilliant
or useful results; his reasoning is seldom satisfactory; and a broad
vein of prolixity traverses his philosophical works. He was too fond
of mechanical philosophy to shine in chemistry, and gave too much time
and attention to theological and metaphysical controversy to attain
any excellence in either of the former studies. He who would do
justice to Boyle's scientific character must found it rather upon the
indirect benefits which he conferred, than upon any immediate aid
which he lent to science. He exhibited a variety of experiments in
public, which kindled the zeal of others more capable than himself. He
was always open to conviction, and courted opposition and controversy
upon the principle that truth is often elicited by the conflict of
opinions." From none of this do we dissent except as to degree. To say
that Boyle did not attain _any_ excellence in chemistry, or furnish
"any immediate aid" to science, is surely too much. Perhaps it will be
a fair method to take a foreign history of physics (where national
partiality is out of the question) and try the following point: What
are those discoveries of the Briton of the seventeenth century which
would be thought worthy of record by a Frenchman of the nineteenth? In
the 'Hist. Phil. du Progrès de la Physique,' Paris, 1810, by M. Libes,
we find a chapter devoted to the "Progrès de la Physique entre les
Mains de Boyle," and we are told that the air-pump in his hands became
a new machine--that such means in the hands of a man of genius
multiply science, and that it is impossible to follow Boyle through
his labours without being astonished at the immensity of his resources
for tearing out the secrets of nature. The discovery of the
propagation of sound by the air (the more creditable to Boyle that
Otto von Guericke had been led astray as to the cause), of the
absorbing power of the atmosphere, of the elastic force and combustive
power of steam, the approximation to the weight of the air, the
discovery of the _reciprocal_ attraction of the electrified and
non-electrified body, are mentioned as additions to the science.
Between the character implied in the two preceding quotations, we have
no doubt the true one is to be found. But there is a peculiar
advantage consequent upon such a labourer as Boyle in the infancy of
such a science as chemistry. Here are no observed facts of such common
occurrence, and the phenomena of which are so distinctly understood,
that any theory receives something like assent or dissent as soon as
it is proposed. The science of mechanics must have originally stood to
chemistry much in the same relation as the objects of botany to those
of mineralogy: the first presenting themselves, the second to be
sought for. The mine was to be found as well as worked; and every one
who sank a shaft diminished the labour of his successors by showing at
least one place where it was not. In this point of view it is
impossible to say to what degree of obligation chemistry is to limit
its acknowledgments to Boyle. Searching every inlet which phenomena
presented, trying the whole material world in detail, and with a
disposition to prize an error prevented, as much as a truth
discovered, it cannot be told how many were led to that which does
exist, by the previous warning of Boyle as to that which does not.
Perhaps had his genius been of a higher order he would have made fewer
experiments and better deductions; but as it was, he was admirably
fitted for the task he undertook, and no one can say that his works,
the eldest progeny of the 'Novum Organum,' were anything but a credit
to the source from whence they sprang, or that their author is
unworthy to occupy a high place in our Pantheon, though not precisely
on the grounds taken in many biographies or popular treatises.

The characteristics of Boyle as a theological writer are much the same
as those which appertain to him as a philosopher. He does not enter
at all into disputed articles of faith, and preserves a quiet and
argumentative tone throughout. In his discourse against customary
swearing, written when he was very young, he shows a little of the
vein which distinguishes his letters: but the very great prolixity
which he falls into renders him almost unreadable. He was, as he
informs us in his youth, a writer of verses; and one fancy-piece in
prose, 'The Martyrdom of Theodora,' has been preserved, wherein his
hero and heroine make set speeches to each other, of a kind somewhat
like those in Cicero de Oratore, with a little dash of Amadis de
Gaule, until the executioner relieves the reader. The treatises 'on
Seraphic Love,' 'Considerations on the Style of the Scriptures,' and
'on the great Veneration that Man's Intellect owes to God,' have a
place in the _Index librorum prohibitorum_ of the Roman Church.
(Kippis, 'Biog. Brit.') His 'Occasional Reflections' have fallen under
the lash of the two greatest satirists in our language, Swift and
Butler, in the 'Pious Meditation upon a Broomstick' of the former, and
an 'Occasional Reflection on Dr. Charlton's feeling a Dog's Pulse at
Gresham College,' published with the posthumous writings of the
latter. We are induced to give an extract from his now little known
Reflections, as at once a specimen of his style and as affording a
standard to judge of the merits of his better known satirists:--

"_Reflection VI._--_Sitting at ease in a Coach that went very
fast._--As fast as this coach goes, I sit in it so much at ease, that
whilst its rapid motion makes others suspect that I am running for a
wager, this lazy posture, and this soft seat, do almost as much invite
me to rest, as if I were a-bed. The hasty wheels strike fire out of
the flints they happen to run over, and yet this self-same swiftness
of these wheels, which, were I under them, would make them crush my
bones themselves into splinters, if not into a jelly, now I am seated
over them, and above their reach, serves but to carry me the faster
towards my journey's end. Just so it is with outward accidents, and
conditions, whose restless vicissitudes but too justly and too fitly
resemble them to wheels: when they meet with a spirit that lies
prostrate on the ground, and falls groveling beneath them, they
disorder and oppress it; but he, whose high reason and exalted piety,
has, by a noble and steady contempt of them, placed him above them,
may enjoy a happy and a settled quiet, in spite of all these busy
agitations, and be so far from resenting any prejudicial discomposure
from their inferior revolutions, that all those changes, that are
taken for the giddy turns of fortune's wheel, shall serve to approach
him the faster to the blest mansion he would arrive at."

The 'Boylean Lectures' were instituted by him in his last will, and
endowed with the proceeds of certain property, as a salary for a
"divine or preaching minister," on condition of preaching eight
sermons in the year for proving the Christian religion against
notorious infidels, viz. atheists, theists, pagans, Jews, and
Mahometans, not descending lower to any controversies that are among
Christians themselves. The minister is also required to promote the
propagation of Christianity, and answer the scruples of all who apply
to him. The stipend was made perpetual by Archbishop Tennison. Dr.
Bentley was appointed the first Boyle lecturer. We shall not give a
detailed list of all the titles of Boyle's works, which would occupy
much room to little purpose, as a complete set of the original
editions is very rarely met with, and the two collected editions have
their own indexes. During his lifetime, in 1677, a very imperfect and
incorrect edition was published at Geneva. The first complete edition
was published in 1744 by Dr. Birch, as already noticed. It is in five
volumes folio, and contains the life which has furnished all
succeeding writers with authorities, besides a very copious index. The
collection of letters in the fifth volume is highly interesting. The
second complete edition was published in 1772. But previously to
either of these, in 1780, Dr. Shaw, the editor of Bacon, deserved well
of the scientific world by publishing an edition of Boyle in three
volumes quarto, "abridged, methodized, and disposed under general
heads." The second edition was published in 1738. As far as may be,
the various and scattered experiments are brought together, and a good
index added, but we cannot find any references to the originals. There
is a list of Boyle's works in Hutton's mathematical dictionary, and
another in Moreri. There is a copious life, taken mostly from Dr.
Birch, in the 'Biog. Brit.,' and the same with some additions in Dr.
Kippis's unfinished reprint.

It will be useful to remember as to contemporary chronology, that
Boyle was born in the year in which Bacon died, and Newton in that in
which Galileo died; Boyle being fifteen years older than Newton.




[Illustration: Baxter.]


This eminent Nonconformist divine was born at Rowdon, a small village
in Shropshire, on the 12th of November, 1615; but he resided till 1625
at Eaton Constantine, about five miles from Shrewsbury. The contiguity
of his birth-place to the seat of Lord Newport was probably the means
of introducing him to the notice of that nobleman. His father's little
property was so much encumbered, as to prevent him from giving his son
any education beyond what could be obtained from the village
schoolmasters, who were neither competent teachers nor moral men. To
Mr. John Owen, who kept the free grammar-school at Wroxeter, Baxter
acknowledges some obligations. Though he was captain of the school,
his acquirements were very inconsiderable when he left it. His
ambition was to enter one of the universities to qualify himself for
the ministry; but his master, Mr. Owen, probably perceiving that he
required more regular instruction than he could expect to receive
from a college tutor, recommended him to Mr. Richard Wickstead,
chaplain to the council at Ludlow, who had an allowance from
government for a divinity student. Though the defects in his previous
education were but ill supplied by this arrangement (Wickstead being a
negligent tutor), he had access to a good library, where he acquired a
taste for those studies which he pursued with such indefatigable
diligence in after-life. Here he continued for eighteen months, when
he returned to his father's house, and, at Lord Newport's request,
supplied for a few months the place of his old master at Wroxeter
grammar-school. Finding all his hopes of going to the university
disappointed he resumed his professional studies under the direction
of Mr. Francis Garbett, a clergyman of some celebrity, who conducted
him through a course of theology, and gave him much valuable
assistance in his general reading. While he was thus engaged, he was
suddenly diverted from his pursuits by a proposition from his friend,
Mr. Wickstead, to try his fortune at court. The project, singular as
it was, seems not to have been unpalatable either to the future
puritan-divine or to his father: theology was thrown aside, and Baxter
went up to Whitehall, specially introduced to Sir Henry Herbert,
master of the revels, as an aspirant to royal favour. His reception
was courteous and even kind. For one month he mingled in the
festivities of the palace--a period which was sufficient to convince
him of the unsuitableness of such a mode of life to his tastes, his
habits, and his conscience;--he then returned home, and resumed his
studies with a determination never to be again diverted from them.
Before he went to London, his religious impressions were deepened by
the perusal of Bunny's 'Resolution,' Sibbs's 'Bruised Reed,' and other
works of this kind. Some books which he read after his return
increased that habitual seriousness which he derived from his natural
disposition, as well as from the example of his father; and a
protracted illness completed the preparation of his mind for the
reception of those impressions of religious duty under which he acted
through the remainder of his life.

While he was in this declining state of health, his anxiety to
commence his ministerial labours overcame every other consideration.
He applied for ordination to the bishop of Worcester, and obtained it,
together with a schoolmaster's licence, as he had accepted the
mastership of the free grammar-school at Dudley, just then founded by
his friend Mr. Foley, of Stourbridge. He was then twenty-three years
of age, and at this time entertained no scruples on the subject of
conformity, having never examined with any nicety the grounds of
subscription. His attention, however, was speedily drawn to the
debatable points of the controversy; but, at first, the bitter tone of
the Nonconformists gave him an unfavourable impression of their
character, though he admired their fervent piety, and their energetic
efforts to stem the moral corruption of the times. There was much in
his own views and temperament which corresponded with theirs; but it
required time and circumstances to develop the tendencies of his mind.

At the end of nine months Baxter removed from Dudley to Bridgenorth,
where he acted as assistant to the clergyman. A release from his
school engagements must, to such a mind as Baxter's, intent upon
pastoral duties, have appeared a sufficient inducement for the change,
but, in the then state of his feelings, it was of still greater moment
for him to be relieved from the prospect of having to renew his
subscription. Bridgenorth is the centre of a little district
comprising six parishes, exempt from all episcopal jurisdiction,
except a triennial visitation from the archbishop. Here he expected to
perform the humble duties of a curate without obstruction, happy in
the society of a colleague whose views harmonized with his own, and
still happier in having a wide field for his exertions. But his hopes
were soon frustrated by the "et cetera oath," as it was called, which
enjoined all who had taken orders to swear that they would never
consent to any alteration in the ceremonial or government of the
church by archbishops, bishops, deans, archdeacons, &c. It does not
appear that Mr. Baxter, any more than his brother clergyman at
Bridgenorth, thought it necessary to observe the terms of this oath,
for a complaint was laid against them for non-compliance with the
ritual in various particulars.

Baxter left Bridgenorth after a residence of one year and nine months,
on an invitation from a committee of the parishioners (1640) to become
the officiating clergyman at the parish church in Kidderminster, the
vicar having agreed, in order to settle disputes, to allow 60_l._ per
annum to a curate of their own choosing. The living was afterwards
sequestered, the townsmen collected the tithes, paid Baxter and
Baxter's curate, and gave the vicar 40_l._ per annum. The
circumstances under which Baxter settled at Kidderminster were
favourable to his views; but it was not without considerable
opposition from one portion of the community, whose vices he publicly
reproved, that he carried some of his reforms into effect. Not
satisfied with correcting the more flagrant offences of the
inhabitants, he visited them at their houses, became acquainted with
their families, gave them religious instruction in private, and became
their friend as well as their pastor. By these means he soon wrought a
complete change in the habits of the people. Though so strict a
disciplinarian, his conciliatory manners won the hearts of all but a
few who were irreclaimable. His preaching was acceptable to all ranks.
Wherever he went, large audiences attended him; and his energy was so
unremitting, notwithstanding his feeble health and constant
indisposition, that he preached three or four times a week.

During the civil wars of that period Baxter held a position by which he
was connected with both the opposite parties in the state, and yet was
the partisan of neither. His attachment to monarchy was well known,
though his adherence to the Royalist party was not so certain; while the
deep stream of religious feeling which ran through the conversation of
the Parliamentarians drew his sympathies to that side. The undisguised
respect paid by him to the character of some of the Puritans, made him
and many others, who were sincerely attached to the crown, the objects
of jealousy and persecution. A clamour was raised against them, and the
rabble, whose excesses had been checked by him, were eager enough to
become the trumpeters of the charge. During one of these ebullitions of
party excitement, Baxter spent a few days in the Parliamentary army, and
was preaching within sound of the cannon when the memorable battle was
fought at Edgehill. His friends, not considering it safe for him to
return to Kidderminster, he retired to Coventry, where he lived two
years, preaching regularly to the Parliamentary garrison and to the
inhabitants. After the battle of Naseby, in 1645, he passed a night on a
visit to some friends in Cromwell's army, a circumstance which led to
the chaplaincy of Colonel Whalley's regiment being offered to him,
which, after consulting his friends at Coventry, he accepted. In this
capacity he was present at the taking of Bridgewater, the sieges of
Exeter, Bristol, and Worcester, by Colonels Whalley and Rainsborough. He
lost no opportunity of moderating the temper of the champions of the
Commonwealth, and of restraining them within the bounds of reason; but
as it was known that the check proceeded from one who was unfriendly to
the ulterior objects of the party, his interference was coolly received.
Among the soldiery he laboured with unceasing ardour to diffuse a better
spirit, and to correct those sectarian errors, as he considered
them--anabaptism, antinomianism, and separatism inclusive,--which in his
view were so productive of disputes and animosity.

After his recovery from an illness, which compelled him to leave the
army, we find him again at Kidderminster, exerting himself with
renewed vigour to moderate conflicting opinions. The conduct of
Cromwell at this crisis exceedingly perplexed that class of men of
whom Baxter might be regarded as the type. For the sake of peace they
yielded to an authority which they condemned as a usurpation, but
nothing could purchase their approbation of the measures by which it
had been attained and was supported. In open conference, Baxter did
not scruple to denounce Cromwell and his adherents as guilty of
treason and rebellion; though he afterwards doubted if he was right
in opposing him so strongly. (See Baxter's 'Penitent Confessions,'
quoted in Orme.) The reputation of Baxter rendered his countenance to
the new order of things highly desirable, and accordingly no pains
were spared to procure it. At the suggestion of some of his noble
friends, he once preached before the Protector, who afterwards invited
him to an interview, and endeavoured to reconcile him to the political
changes that had taken place; but the preacher was unconvinced by his
arguments, and boldly told him that "the honest people of the land
took their antient monarchy to be a blessing, and not an evil." The
necessity of any alteration in the government did not come within the
scope of his comprehension. He looked with a single eye to the
diffusion of a deeper spirit of religion by means of a purified
establishment, beyond which he was incapable of carrying his views or
lending his sanction.

In the disputes which prevailed about this time on the subject of
episcopal ordination, Baxter took the side of the Presbyterians in
denying its necessity. With them, too, he agreed in matters of
discipline and church government. He dissented from them in their
condemnation of episcopacy as unlawful. On their great principle, viz.
the sufficiency of the Scriptures to determine all points of faith and
conduct, he wavered for some time, but ultimately adopted it in its
full extent. Occupying, as he did, this middle ground between the
Episcopalians and the Presbyterians, it was not very obvious with
which of the two parties he was to be classed. Had all impositions and
restraints been removed, there is every reason to suppose that he
would have preferred a moderate episcopacy to any other form of church
government; but the measures of the prelatical party were so grievous
to the conscience, that he had no choice between sacrificing his
opinions or quitting their communion.

The views maintained by Baxter, blended as they were with the
principles of monarchy, made them extremely popular towards the close
of Cromwell's career, when men were beginning to find that they had
only exchanged one species of tyranny for another, and, as some
thought, for a worse. In the sermon which Baxter preached before the
parliament on the day preceding that on which they voted the return of
the king, he spoke his sentiments on this subject with manly
resolution, and in allusion to the political state of the country, he
maintained that loyalty to their king was a thing essential to all
true Protestants of every persuasion.

It was expected that on the restoration of the king moderation would
have prevailed in the councils of the nation, and a conciliatory
policy have been adopted with regard to religious opinions. Some
indication of such a spirit appeared in the appointment of
Presbyterian divines among the king's chaplains, and Baxter along with
the rest. Many who had access to the king strenuously recommended
conciliation, and for a time their advice prevailed against the
intrigues of court influence. Among other measures a conference was
appointed at the Savoy, consisting of a certain number of Episcopalian
and Presbyterian divines, to devise a form of ecclesiastical
government which might reconcile the differences and satisfy the
scruples of the contending parties. Baxter and the Presbyterians were
extremely desirous of bringing this commission to a successful issue;
and Baxter himself drew up a reformed liturgy, which, with some
alterations he presented at this conference. The Presbyterians would
have accepted Bishop Usher's scheme as a model, with any alterations
which might be mutually agreed upon; but the bishops were secretly
opposed to the arrangement, and finally frustrated it by carrying a
declaration to this effect, that although all were agreed upon the
ends contemplated in this commission, they disagreed about the means.
Having thus defeated the object of the conference, the next step was
to sequestrate the livings of those divines who had been inducted
during the Protectorate. Oaths and subscriptions, which had been
suspended while there was any prospect of a union of parties, were
again called for by the bishops and their adherents. In accordance
with this demand a law was passed in 1662, called the Act of
Uniformity, so strict in its requisitions upon the debatable points of
ceremonial worship, that it had the effect of banishing at once two
thousand divines from the pale of the English church. Of this number
was Baxter. Previous to the passing of this measure he had refused the
bishopric of Hereford and other preferments offered him by Clarendon,
the Chancellor, asking one favour only in lieu of them--to be allowed
to return to his beloved flock at Kidderminster. The vicar, who was
ejected in 1640, had been restored; and was bound by the old agreement
to pay Baxter 60_l._ a year as a lecturer. But Baxter was willing to
perform the pastoral duties without remuneration: all he wanted was to
watch over those whom he had brought into the fold of Christ; but this
request was refused.

On the 25th of May, 1662, three months before the day on which the
Bartholomew Act, as the Act of Uniformity was called, from its coming
into operation on St. Bartholomew's day, Baxter had preached in London
his last sermon, under a regular engagement in the church; and,
finding his public duties at an end, he retired in July, 1663, to
Acton, in Middlesex, where he employed most of his leisure in writing
for the press. Some of his largest works were the fruits of this
seclusion. His two most popular treatises, 'The Saints' Everlasting
Rest,' and 'A Call to the Unconverted,' were published before he left
Kidderminster, and raised his fame as a writer to a higher pitch than
what he had enjoyed even as a preacher. Several attempts were made by
the ejected ministers and their friends in parliament to get the
rigorous restrictions against them removed, but without success. The
persecutions continued with unabated violence. Even those who, like
Baxter, disliked separation, and attended the worship of the church,
suffered penalties for having morning and evening prayers at their own
houses. In the midst of those awful calamities, the plague and the
fire, which raged with such frightful devastation in two successive
years, the services of the Puritan divines to the inhabitants of the
metropolis were so conspicuous, that the current of opinion turned in
their favour, and led to new efforts in their behalf, which ended for
the time in the Indulgence granted in 1672. This drew Baxter from his
retirement at Totteridge, to which place he had removed on the
suppression of his ministry at Acton. He settled again in London, and
preached as a lecturer in different parts of the City, but more
constantly at Pinner's Hall and Fetter Lane. His preaching, though
highly acceptable to his more immediate friends, was never so popular
as it had been at Kidderminster. While he advocated tolerance from an
intolerant communion he shone like a light in a dark place; but now
that he was the apologist of conformity, while he was a sufferer for
non-conformity, his conduct involved a kind of consistency too refined
for public admiration. An ineffectual attempt which he made at this
time to combine the Protestant interests against Papal ascendency
exposed him to various misrepresentations, to remove which he
published a vindication of himself in a tract entitled 'An Appeal to
the Light,' but without eradicating the unfavourable impressions.

His time was now divided between writing and preaching. For a while he
had a regular audience in a room over St. James's market-house, and at
other places in London. But his public duties were frequently
suspended by those rigorous enactments to which the Nonconformists
were subjected during the last two reigns of the Stuarts.

In 1682 the officers of the law burst into his house, at a time when
he laboured under severe indisposition, with a warrant to seize his
person for coming within five miles of a corporation, and would have
hurried him before a justice of the peace in this condition, had they
not been met by his physician, whose interference probably saved his
life as well as obtained his pardon. Two years later, while his health
was still in a precarious state from a chronic disease, he was again
harassed by distraints and penal proceedings. Still later it was his
misfortune to be one of the unhappy victims of Jeffreys. He was
apprehended on a lord chief justice's warrant, on a charge of sedition
and being hostile to episcopacy. The charge was founded on some
passages in his 'Paraphrase of the New Testament.' On the trial,
Jeffreys, not content with using language the most opprobrious to the
prisoner and his counsel, acted the part of prosecutor as well as
judge, and scrupled not to gain his ends by silencing the accused, by
insulting his counsel, by refusing to hear his witnesses, and by
triumphing over his sentence. He said upon the bench, "he was sorry
that the Act of Indemnity disabled him from hanging him." His
punishment was a fine of 500 marks, to lie in prison till it was paid,
and to be bound to his good behaviour for seven years. For the
non-payment of this heavy penalty he was committed to the King's Bench
prison, where he lay until the 26th of November in the following year
(1686), having been confined for nearly eighteen months. His pardon
was obtained by the mediation of Lord Powis, and the fine was
remitted. The solitude of his prison was enlivened on this, as on
former occasions, by the affectionate attentions of his wife. Baxter
himself lived to see that favourable change in reference to religious
toleration which commenced at the Revolution of 1688. He died on the
8th of December, 1691, and was buried in Christ Church, Newgate-Street.

The literary career of Baxter is not the least extraordinary part of
his history. He published a body of practical and polemical divinity
with a rapidity almost unequalled; the excellence of some of his
practical writings secured them an unexampled popularity, and thus
laid the foundation of a new theological system which still retains
his name. The catalogue of his works is not easily described. It
contains nearly 168 distinct publications. (See list in Orme's Life,
prefixed to the edition of his works, London, 1830.) Many of these are
only known to his admirers, but others are more read than any other
productions of a religious character. His fame chiefly rests on his
two most popular works, and on his 'Methodus Theologiæ' and 'Catholic
Theology,' in which his peculiar views are embodied. Several of his
learned contemporaries have recorded their testimony to the character
of his writings. Sir Matthew Hale was a constant reader of them, and
honoured Baxter with his friendship. Bishop Wilkins praised him in the
phrase that Johnson afterwards applied to Goldsmith: "he has
cultivated every subject which he has handled;" and Dr. Isaac Barrow
said, that "his practical writings were never mended, and his
controversial ones seldom confuted." Baxter left behind him a
'Narrative of the most Memorable Passages of his Life and Times,'
which was published in a folio volume after his death (1696) by his
intimate friend Mr. Matthew Sylvester, under the title 'Reliquiæ
Baxterianæ.' It is here that we find that review of his religious
opinions written in the latter part of his life, which Coleridge
speaks of as one of the most remarkable pieces of writing that have
come down to us. (See Coleridge's 'Biographia Literaria.') Calamy's
'Life of Baxter' is a kind of abridgment of this work, which abounds
in notices of the men, the transactions, the habits, and the opinions
of the stirring period in which he lived.

There are a few poems by Baxter, not long ago published in a small
volume. His 'World of Spirits' has been lately reprinted.

The name of Baxterians, adopted by his more immediate adherents, is
now almost extinct: but Baxterianism is still the resting place of
many who do not approve of the extremes of Calvinism. The Baxterians
hardly ever attained the rank of a separate denomination, even when
they were most numerous; and they are now completely scattered among
different communions. Their writings are most popular among the
orthodox dissenters.




[Illustration: PURCELL]


Henry Purcell, the pride and boast of the English school of music, was
born in the year 1658, in the city of Westminster, it is generally
supposed. His father Henry, and also his uncle Thomas Purcell, were
appointed gentlemen of the chapel-royal at the Restoration, and are
named, in the archives of the herald's college, among the persons who
officiated at the coronation of Charles II. The young Henry lost his
father when but six years of age, about which time he appears to have
entered as one of the children of the chapel under Captain Cook, then
master, to whom therefore it is rather more than probable he was
indebted not only for his initiation in the principles of music, but
for much of his knowledge of its practice, and of its theory as
applicable to composition. It is true that on Dr. Blow's monumental
tablet in Westminster Abbey it is triumphantly recorded that he was
"master to the famous Mr. Henry Purcell;" and no doubt the youthful
musician, when he quitted the chapel on his voice changing, received
some instructions from Blow, a master then in high repute, and from
whom a few lessons were enough to recommend to public notice a young
man on his entrance into the world; but to Cook the credit is due for
the right guidance of Purcell's inborn genius, and for its early
cultivation. Sir John Hawkins says, "it is certain that he was a
scholar of Pelham Humphrey, who was Cook's successor," but gives no
authority for this, and assigns no reason for his belief. Humphrey
became master of the children in 1672, when Purcell had attained his
fourteenth year, who consequently could not have remained long, if at
all, under the tuition of the new master: Cook therefore must not on
such doubtful evidence be deprived of the praise to which he is
entitled for his large share in the education of our great English
composer. But, as Dr. Burney has well remarked, "there is nothing more
common than this _petit larceny_ among musicians. If the first master
has drudged eight or ten years with a pupil of genius, and it is
thought necessary, in compliance with fancy or caprice, that he should
receive a few lessons from a second, this last instantly arrogates to
himself the whole honour both of the talents and cultivation of his
new scholar, and the first and chief instructor is left to sing _sic
vos non vobis_."

Purcell was remarkable for precocity of talent, and seconded the
liberality of nature by his zeal and diligence. While yet a
boy-chorister he composed more than one anthem; and in 1676, though
only eighteen years of age, was chosen to succeed Dr. Christopher
Gibbons as organist of Westminster Abbey, an appointment of high
professional rank. Six years after, in 1682, he became one of the
organists of the royal chapel; and there, as well as at the Abbey,
produced his numerous anthems, many of which appear in different
collections, and nearly all of them have recently been published in
one complete work. These were eagerly sought, almost as soon as
written, for the use of the various cathedrals, and thus his fame
quickly travelled to the remotest parts of England and Ireland. Had
Purcell confined himself to church music only, he would have stood on
very lofty ground as compared with either his predecessors or
contemporaries, and his works would have been transmitted with honour
to after-ages; but the greatness of his genius is most conspicuous in
his compositions for the chamber and the stage. In these the vividness
of his imagination and the fertility of his invention appear in all
their affluence, because unrestrained by the character of the poetry
to which he gave musical expression, and unincumbered by what is
termed musical erudition, a kind of learning which time (even a
century and a half ago) and a laudable feeling of veneration had
rendered an almost necessary attribute of cathedral harmony. The
versatility of his talent and the division of his labours between the
church and the theatre, led his facetious friend, Tom Brown, in his
'Letters from the Dead to the Living,' to say that musical men "hang
between the church and the playhouse, as Mahomet's tomb does between
the two loadstones, and must equally incline to both, because by both
are equally supported."

Purcell's first essay in dramatic music, when only nineteen years of
age, was his setting the songs, &c. in Nahum Tate's 'Dido and Æneas,' an
operetta written for a boarding-school of celebrity. In this is the
simple and beautiful duet, 'Fear no danger,' once sung everywhere and by
everybody, but now almost forgotten. The music in Nat. Lee's
'Theodosius, or the Force of Love,' performed at the Duke's theatre, in
1690, was his first work for the public stage. In the same year he set
new music to 'The Tempest,' as altered by Dryden, which is still heard
with delight, and also the 'Prophetess, or Diocletian,' altered by
Dryden and Betterton from Beaumont and Fletcher. In 1691 he composed the
songs, &c. in Dryden's 'King Arthur,' among which are the inimitable
frost-scene, the very original and lovely air, 'Fairest Isle,' and the
charming duet, 'Two daughters of this aged stream are we.' In 1692
appeared Sir R. Howard's and Dryden's 'Indian Queen,' with Purcell's
music. The fine incantation scene in this, 'Ye twice ten hundred
deities,' is yet often heard in good concerts, but never in fashionable
ones. The duet and chorus, 'To arms,' and the air, 'Britons, strike
home!' in Dryden's alteration of 'Bonduca,' are national property--are
our war-songs, always received with acclamations when we are engaged in
or menaced by hostilities, and frequently performed during peace on
account of their beauty, musically considered. These alone will suffice
to carry Purcell's name to distant ages. His music in D'Urfey's 'Don
Quixote' is remarkably appropriate and clever: the song, 'Genius of
England,' has few rivals, and the cantata, 'Let the dreadful engines of
eternal will,' sung in the character of the love-distracted Cardenio,
is, with the exception of the latter part (now very wisely omitted in
the performance), one of the composer's finest creations. He also wrote
airs, overtures, and act-tunes for many dramas, among which may be
mentioned Dryden and Lee's 'Œdipus,' 'Timon of Athens,' 'The Fairy
Queen,' altered from 'A Midsummer-night's Dream,' and Dryden's 'Tyrannic
Love, or the Royal Martyr.'

The three detached cantatas by Purcell are undeniable proofs of his
fancy, energy, and deep feeling. It is sufficient to name 'Mad Bess,'
'Old Tom of Bedlam,' or 'Mad Tom' (the words by Mr. William Basse,
Walton tells us, in his 'Angler'), and 'From rosy bowers,' written by
Tom D'Urfey, but _not_ originally sung in 'Don Quixote,' as Percy
seems to think. So well known are these, so highly valued by true
connoisseurs, and so much admired by all lovers of music, that one
more word in their praise would be superfluous. It is not necessary to
enter into any account of, or even to name, his many single songs and
duets. After the composer's death they were collected by his widow,
and published in two folio volumes, under the title of 'Orpheus
Britannicus,' the second and best edition of which is now very rare.
His odes, glees, catches, and rounds are numerous, and several of them
familiar to the admirers of vocal harmony. In 1683 he published twelve
sonatas for two violins and a bass. In the preface he says that "he
has faithfully endeavoured a just imitation of the most famed Italian
masters, principally to bring the seriousness and gravity of that
sort of music into vogue and reputation among our countrymen, whose
humour 'tis time now should begin to loathe the levity and _balladry_
of our neighbours." Purcell's esteem for the Italian masters had been
before confessed in the dedication of his 'Diocletian' to the Duke of
Somerset, wherein he modestly remarks, "Poetry and painting have
arrived to their perfection in our country: music is yet but in its
nonage, a forward child, which gives hope of what it may be hereafter
in England, when the masters of it shall find more encouragement. 'Tis
now learning Italian, which is its best master, and studying a little
of the French air to give it somewhat more of gayety and fashion. Thus
being farther from the sun, we are of later growth than our
neighbouring countries, and must be content to shake off our barbarity
by degrees." Here he does justice to the French school, by which he
had certainly profited, though in a perfectly fair manner.

Two years after his decease his widow printed the overtures,
act-tunes, &c. before mentioned, under the title of 'A Collection of
Ayres composed for the Theatre, and on other Occasions,' &c. They are
in four parts, and continued in use in Dr. Burney's time, till
superseded by Handel's concertos and other newer compositions.

We have above alluded to Purcell's compositions for the church, and as
regards these must add a few remarks. His published anthems amount in
number to upwards of fifty; and to these are to be added a _Te Deum_
and _Jubilate_ with orchestral accompaniments--a complete Service,
several hymns, motets, and sacred songs. Some of his anthems,
especially those in Dr. Boyce's Collection, are still in use in our
cathedral and other choirs, and never can be allowed to fall into
neglect while the influential persons in those venerable
establishments possess any musical discernment. His _Te Deum_ and
_Jubilate_, to which the epithet "grand" is the usual prefix, is a
work that has seldom if ever been spoken of but in terms
of unqualified panegyric. That it evinces many traits of
originality--that it displays a vast deal of scientific skill--that an
easy, pleasing melody runs through portions of it--and that it has
also the merit of being the first of the kind ever produced in this
country, cannot be denied: but, on the other hand, there is in its
general structure a want of suitable grandeur--mainly arising from the
frequent occurrence of mean passages of pointed, jerking notes in the
vocal parts, that take from it much of the solemnity which the subject
demands; and these, together with certain divisions that disconnect
the words and obscure the sense, produce an effect not only
undignified, but nearly bordering on the ridiculous. Besides these
greater defects, there are in the work some others of less importance,
such as a few conceits, some harsh notes, and occasional errors in
accentuation and emphasis. The best excuse for the composer is, that
most of the errors we have ventured to point out were common at the
time they were committed. Still they are errors, and of magnitude, and
should have kept within moderate bounds that warmth of feeling which
has led to such unreserved encomiums on what, in our opinion, is by no
means to be reckoned among the best of the composer's works.

Purcell died in November, 1695, of consumption, Hawkins surmises; and
it is to be wished that this always industrious and sometimes
over-diligent historian had not snatched from the oblivion to which it
ought to have been consigned, a "tradition" that his death was
occasioned by a cold caught in an inclement night, waiting for
admittance into his house, Mrs. Purcell having "given orders to his
servants not to let him in after midnight." We regret to say that this
exceedingly improbable story has lately been revived, without the
slightest attempt at proof, accompanied by vituperative expressions
most injurious to the memory of one who, if we may judge from her
language in the dedication to the 'Orpheus Britannicus,' was an
attached, faithful wife, and incapable of the cruelty alleged against
her. Purcell's habits, Hawkins states, were of the most convivial
kind, and led him too frequently into the society of "the witty Tom
Brown," together with other persons of irregular lives; and thus were,
most likely, sown the seeds of a disease which at so early a period
terminated a life of such inestimable value.

The remains of this great musician lie in the north transept of
Westminster Abbey: on a pillar near the spot is a tablet, placed there
by the Lady Elizabeth Howard, on which is the subjoined inscription,
commonly attributed to Dryden:--

  "Here lies
  HENRY PURCELL, Esq.,
  who left this life,
  and is gone to that blessed place
  where only his harmony can be exceeded.
  Obiit 21 mo. die Novembris,
  Anno ætatis suæ 37 mo.,
  Annoq. Domini, 1695."

On the stone over his grave was a Latin epitaph, now entirely effaced.
The original and a translation are both given by Hawkins and Burney.
Among the works of Dryden is an epitaph on the death of his friend
Purcell, but it cannot be viewed as one of the happiest of the great
poet's efforts. Sheffield, duke of Buckingham, wrote an ode on the
same occasion, in which are some noble thoughts concerning the desire
of posthumous fame. It concludes with the following praise of the art
in which our British composer signalised himself:--

      "Music exalts man's nature, and inspires
      High elevated thoughts, or gentle kind desires."


END OF VOL. IX.


London: Printed by WILLIAM CLOWES and SONS, Stamford Street.




Transcriber's Note


  * Hyphenation inconsistencies left as in the original.

  * Obvious punctuation and spelling errors repaired.

  * Footnotes moved to end of respective chapters.


[The end of _The Cabinet Portrait Gallery of British
Worthies Vol 9 of 12_ edited by Charles Knight]