Boyle

“ Rose Lyndwood sat motionless in the shadows of the box, only the lace round the raised hand that held his head trembling a little.
"My lord," continued Miss Boyle, in a voice mournfully sweet, "thus I reason it—that sure knowledge we both have is so great a thing that—ah, 'tis as if we had been together in some pure temple that none other knew of, and the memory of it were enough. Even if the portals are forever closed, none can steal the picture we have of what lies beyond the doors—but you will smile at me and my poor fancies." ”

“ It was a moment or two before Boyle regained his usual elastic good-humor. Then he coolly returned to the spring, "washed himself of the Indian," as he grimly expressed it to himself, brushed his clothes, picked up the shawl and flask, and returned to the coach. It was getting dark now, but the glow of the western sky shone unimpeded through the windows, and the silence gave him a great fear. He was relieved, however, on opening the door, to find Miss Cantire sitting stiffly in a corner. ”

“ Of a truth, Charming Billy Boyle, living his life in the wide land that is too big and too far removed from the man-made world for any but the strong of heart, knew little indeed of women—her kind of women. When he returned with two chickens and found that the floor had been swept so thoroughly as to look strange to him, and that all his scattered belongings were laid in a neat pile upon the foot of the bunk which was unfamiliar under straightened blankets and pitifully plumped pillows, he was filled with astonishment. Miss Bridger smiled a little and went on washing the dishes. ”

“ His ears tingled, and his eyes swam, as he listened to the opening sentence of the president's address—"Gentlemen, this is leap year; therefore, it is a year and a day since our last annual meeting."
[55] Every nerve in Boyle's body twanged in agony at the ominous, the well-remembered words. His first impulse was to rise and fly; but then—the sneers! the sneers!
How many in this world, as well as poor Boyle, have dreaded a sneer, and dared the wrath of an almighty and eternal God, rather than encounter the sarcastic curl of a fellow-creature's lip! ”

“ Elizabeth and Frances were both probably still “the girls,” and living with their mother, when Robert Boyle, in 1669, left Oxford for good. Their uncle Robyn, the “deare Squire”—was long ago turned philosopher; something of a valetudinary; a virtuoso of an European fame. Philosophers of all nations flocked to see Mr. Boyle’s experiments. The Royal Society—all intellectual London—was waiting for his coming. ”

“ Delicious Leeze, in Essex, where Charles and Mary lived, was not far from London. “You shall be absolute master of your own time,” Mary assured him—conscious, no doubt, that Charles did not know much about the New Philosophy. And at Marston Bigot, in Somersetshire, dear Broghill and Lady Pegg, when they were in England, were most excellent company. Marston was not far from Stalbridge, and though Boyle did not now often stay at his manor-house, he liked to keep it in perfect order, for Frank’s sake, who might have it after him. ”

“ For the women of the Boyle family, whatever their [73] education had or had not been, were every whit as clever by nature as the men: “Believe it,” wrote the family friend, Sir John Leeke, to Sir Edmund Verney, about the ladies of the Boyle family, “Ould Corke could not begett nothing foolish.” Lady Dungarvan, his daughter-in-law, and his daughters Lady Barrymore, Lady Lettice Goring, Lady Katharine Jones and the little Lady Mary Boyle, were all at Stalbridge at this time, together with several of the grandchildren and all the “retinues.” ”

“ After his wife’s death, Richard Boyle, now a landowner and a man of some importance in Munster, [8] had his time full fighting his personal enemies. There were powerful men among them, and by his own account they “all joined together, by their lies, complaining against me to Queen Elizabeth.” ”

“ Boyle, the student of nature, as Addison and that friend of his who had known him for forty years tell us, never uttered the name of the Supreme Being without making a distinct pause in his speech, in token of his devout recognition of its awful meaning,—surely we, who inherit the accumulated wisdom of nearly two hundred years since the time of the British philosopher, and of almost two thousand since the Greek physician, may well lift our thoughts from the works we study to their great Artificer. ”

“ If these two men could be present at a meeting of the Royal Society in Burlington House to-day! Their two portraits are on its walls. Their two faces look down on modern experimental science. Their self-restraint has had its reward.
Already, in 1670, Boyle was at the height of his literary and scientific popularity, the acknowledged chief of the circle of New Philosophers in London. He had long been a valetudinary, saving his strength for his work, and holding himself aloof from uncongenial company. ”

“ In 1612, after another visit to London and an audience of King James, he found himself Privy Councillor of State for the Kingdom of Ireland. He was created Lord Boyle, Baron of Youghal, in 1616, and Viscount of Dungarvan and Earl of Cork in 1620. His home life had run parallel with his public services. “My Howses,” “My deare Wife,” “the Children,” “my Famullye,” fill an important place in the Earl’s life and diary and letters; while the wife’s few little epistolary efforts to her husband have only one beginning: he was to her always “My owne goode Selfe.” ”

“ Men who knew us both will expect from me no eulogy of Boyle O'Reilly. You mourn the journalist, the orator, the poet, the patriot of two peoples—the strong, tender, true, and knightly character. I mourn with you, and I also mourn—alone.
But, after all, the dead speak for themselves. No friend in prose or verse can add a cubit to his stature. No foe, however mendacious, can lessen his fame or the love humanity bears him. ”

“ Was this the heroine of Boyle’s love story—the Hermione whose “cold usage” sent him to write his Seraphick Love at Leeze?—the woman whose views on a Marriage State found their way into his Martyrdom of Theodora and of Didymus? It will probably never be known. Whoever the lady, whatever the reason, the affair seems to have been, in modern parlance, “off” before the end of 1648. And yet, a whole year later, in December 1649, Robert Boyle was in London again, scorching his wings at the flame. ”

“ Boyle could have lived with much satisfaction to himself.” [186]
His horse would carry him between Oxford and London at any time: each night, on the road, he might lie under some hospitable roof of friend or relative, in mansions set in shady parks, amid flower-gardens and fishponds. And once in London, his sister Ranelagh’s door in the Old Mall was always open to him. And Gresham College, and Mr. Hartlib, and Mr. Clodius, and the rest of the Invisibles would receive him with ecstasy. The Hartlib family had moved to Charing Cross ”

“ Nine men out of ten would have passed the unfortunate with a look of pity or of scorn. Ninety-nine gentlemen out of a hundred, going home from their club, would have given not a thought to the outcast. But Boyle O'Reilly, whether he wore the dress-coat or the convict suit, never for one instant forgot his kinship with all the poor and lowly and unfortunate of earth. ”

“ I saw her pulpit in the open air close to the river, with the broad reaches of the Channel and ships sailing in behind it. When she preaches there it must be a very striking scene. Numbers of people crowded round to ask—'Isna Lady Boyle a cooming down?'—and all the little children, 'Is Lady Boyle a cooming? Tell us, Mister, where's Lady Boyle?'
"When we returned to the other village, St. George's, Miss Boyle and her maid were sitting on a well in an old farmhouse garden, singing beautiful revival hymns to a troop of mothers and little children, who listened with delight. ”

“ In October 1646, Robert Boyle was back on a visit to London, perhaps to see the great Essex buried “in kingly state.” On that day, the solemn pageant just over, he sat down to write a letter—a wonderful letter for a boy not yet twenty—to Marcombes in Geneva. He wrote of the long procession of four hundred officers, “not one so low as a captain,” the House of Peers, the House of Commons, the City-Fathers, and the Assembly of Divines, that had followed Essex to the grave. But to Robert Boyle the “pageants of sorrow” had “eaten up the reality” ”

“ I admitted. "All the other poor chaps in your shop are dead, aren't they?"
"Twelve chaps and four females; all dead," admitted Mr. Boyle. "Funny thing, wasn't it? Right through me trouser and never touched the sock!"
"Eighty injured from the other shops!" I reflected. "What did you think—how did you feel, when—when you realised it all?"
"I never thought much abaht it," responded Mr. Boyle. "Me leg was 'urtin'."
"It isn't a matter one need encourage him to think about," suggested the doctor.
"I can't 'elp thinking about one thing, though," interpolated Mr. Boyle. ”

“ Sir Henry Wotton, the Provost of Eton [39] of that day, was nearing the end of his eventful, chequered life when Robert Boyle, not yet nine years old, came under his care. He was indeed a contemporary of the old Earl, and a Kentish man as well—one of a fine old Kentish stock; but no two men could have been more unlike. He had taken his B.A. at Oxford, and with a slender purse set out on his seven years’ wanderings in European cities, the very same year in which Mr. Richard Boyle had turned the lucky ring on his finger and landed on Irish shores. ”

“ Probably Boyle was in London, for on September 10, Oldenburg was writing as if Boyle had just left town, and he says nothing in his letter to Boyle of the Fire itself, but begins, as it were, when the Fire left off. Boyle had called at Oldenburg’s house to say good-bye, and Oldenburg was much disappointed that he had been out, but was glad that Boyle had been well enough to make the journey: “I cannot omit acquainting you,” he goes on, “that never a calamity—and such a one—was borne so well as this is. It is incredible how little the sufferers, though great ones, do complain of their losses. ”

“ And again: “We find him to be a man fit to be employed by ourselves.”
Boyle was received at Court, and when he was sent back to Ireland it was as Clerk to the Council of Munster, the very post that Spenser had held. He bought Sir Walter Raleigh’s ship, the Pilgrim, freighted her with victuals and ammunition, sailed in her, “by long seas” to Carrickfoyle, and took up his new work under the splendid Presidentship of Sir George Carew. ”

“ Boyle had “entertained himself” with a pretty child in her nurse’s arms; and when Sir Geoffrey at last appeared and apologised for having kept his visitor waiting, the young man “pleasantly told him he had been courting a young lady for his wife.” ”

“ Boyle was unconscious, as he had been from the moment he fell. They stretched him on the doctor’s cot. With the blankets spread underfoot to keep down the dust, the early sun shining in through the lifted flap, Slavens put aside whatever animosity he held against the man and went to work earnestly in an endeavor to save his life. 313
Ten-Gallon showed a nervous anxiety to get away. He wanted to go after his horse; he wanted to go to Boyle’s tent and get breakfast for himself; and then he pressed the necessity of his presence in Comanche to keep and preserve the peace. ”

“ Vanquished for once, the Earl of Cork had been in treaty with more than one other youthful suitor for Mary’s hand. But Mary Boyle has told her own story. [85] “Living so much at my ease,” she says, “I was [95] unwilling to change my condition.” After Frank’s marriage, his wife Betty lived with the Earl in the House of the Savoy, where she and Mary Boyle became close friends and “chamber fellows.” Betty obtained “a great and ruling power” over Mary, “inticing her to spend” (as she did) “her time in seeing and reading plays and romances, and in exquisite and curious dressing.” ”

“ Boyle was still in Oxford in November, when the Duke of York and “many gallants” were going off to join the Fleet; and in December, when the “mighty vote” of £2,500,000 was passed, that Charles II might “be possessed of the dominion at sea, and the disposal of Trade.” [288] Everybody in London was feeling very rich and belligerent—the exact methods by which the money was to be raised not having been yet decided upon. That same November, Oldenburg was begging for Boyle’s communications to the Society on the History of Cold. ”

“ Boyle's was a resort for politicians, journalists, artists, actors, musicians, merchants, gamblers, professional men generally, and sporting men specially. Boyle himself has always been a lover of the horse and a patron of the turf ”

“ Quickly back in Ireland, Richard Boyle became the Lord President’s right hand in all his strenuous services to the Crown: in later years one of the few literary treasures in the great Earl’s “studdie” was the copy of Carew’s Hibernia Pacata given him by his Chief. It was Carew who sent him in 1602 to London, furnished with letters to Cecil and to Sir Walter Raleigh, recommending him as a fit purchaser of the Raleigh Estates in Ireland. ”

“ Boyle, like many men of his time, was a student of divinity as well as of science; and he had come to Oxford partly, perhaps, on account of the Orientalists there. For he was studying Hebrew, Greek, Chaldee and Syriac, so as to be able to read the Scriptures for himself. ”