Chapter IV: Part 4

“It is needless to say, that with those vast resources, his conversation was at all times rich and instructive in no ordinary degree. But it was, if possible, still more pleasing than wise, and had all the charms of familiarity, with all the substantial treasures of knowledge. No man could be more social in his spirit, less assuming or fastidious in his manners, or more kind and indulgent towards all who approached him. * * * His talk, too, though overflowing with information, had no resemblance to lecturing, or solemn discoursing; but, on the contrary, was full of colloquial spirit and pleasantry. He had a certain quiet and grave humour, which ran through most of his conversation, and a vein of temperate jocularity, which gave infinite zest and effect to the condensed and inexhaustible information which formed its main staple and characteristic. There was a little air of affected testiness, and a tone of pretended rebuke and contradiction, which he used towards his younger friends, that was always felt by them as an endearing mark of his kindness and familiarity, and prized accordingly, far beyond all the solemn compliments that ever proceeded from the lips of authority. His voice was deep and powerful; though he commonly spoke in a low and somewhat monotonous tone, which harmonized admirably with the weight and brevity of his observations, and set off to the greatest advantage the pleasant anecdotes which he delivered with the same grave tone, and the same calm smile playing soberly on his lips. There was nothing of effort, indeed, or of impatience, any more than of pride or levity, in his demeanour; and there was a finer expression of reposing strength, and mild self-possession in his manner, than we ever recollect to have met with in any other person. He had in his character the utmost abhorrence for all sorts of forwardness, parade, and pretension; and indeed never failed to put all such impostors out of countenance, by the manly plainness and honest intrepidity of his language and deportment.

“He was twice married, but has left no issue but one son, long associated with him in his business and studies, and two grandchildren by a daughter who predeceased him. He was fellow of the Royal Societies both of London and Edinburgh, and one of the few Englishmen who were elected members of the National Institute of France. All men of learning and of science were his cordial friends; and such was the influence of his mild character, and perfect fairness and liberality, even upon the pretender to these accomplishments, that he lived to disarm even envy itself, and died, we verily believe, without a single enemy.”

Engraved by W. Holl.

MARSHAL TURENNE.

_From the original Picture by Latour,
in the collection of the Musée Royale, Paris._

Under the Superintendance of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful
Knowledge.

_London. Published by Charles Knight, Pall Mall East._
]

TURENNE

Henri de la Tour d’Auvergne, Vicomte de Turenne, born September 16th, 1611, was the second son of the Duc de Bouillon, prince of Sedan, and of Elizabeth of Nassau, daughter of the celebrated William of Orange, to whose courage and talents the Netherlands mainly owed their deliverance from Spain. Both parents being zealous Calvinists, Turenne was of course brought up in the same faith. Soon after his father’s death, the Duchess sent him, when he was not yet thirteen years old, into the Low Countries, to learn the art of war under his uncle, Maurice of Nassau, who commanded the troops of Holland in the protracted struggle between that country and Spain. Maurice held that there was no royal road to military skill, and placed his young relation in the ranks, as a volunteer, where for some time he served, enduring all hardships to which the common soldiers were exposed. In his second campaign he was promoted to the command of a company, which he retained for four years, distinguished by the admirable discipline of his men, by unceasing attention to the due performance of his own duty, and by his eagerness to witness, and become thoroughly acquainted with, every branch of service. In the year 1630, family circumstances rendered it expedient that he should return to France, where the court received him with distinction, and invested him with the command of a regiment.

Four years elapsed before Turenne had an opportunity of distinguishing himself in the service of his native country. His first laurels were reaped in 1634, at the siege of the strong fortress of La Motte, in Lorraine, where he headed the assault, and, by his skill and bravery, mainly contributed to its success. For this exploit he was raised at the early age of twenty-three to the rank of Marechal de Camp, the second grade of military rank in France. In the following year, the breaking out of war between France and Austria opened a wider field of action. Turenne held a subordinate command in the army, which, under the Cardinal de la Valette, marched into Germany to support the Swedes, commanded by the Duke of Weimar. At first fortune smiled on the allies; but, ere long, scarcity of provisions compelled them to a disastrous retreat over a ruined country, in the face of the enemy. On this occasion the young soldier’s ability and disinterestedness were equally conspicuous. He sold his plate and equipage for the use of the army; threw away his baggage to load the waggons with those stragglers who must otherwise have been abandoned; and marched on foot, while he gave up his own horse to the relief of one who had fallen, exhausted by hunger and fatigue. These are the acts which win the attachment of soldiers, and Turenne was idolized by his.

Our limits will not allow of the relation of those campaigns in which the subject of this memoir filled a subordinate part. In 1637–8 he again served under La Valette, in Flanders and Germany, after which he was made Lieutenant-General, a rank not previously existing in France. The three following years he was employed in Italy and Savoy, and in 1642 made a campaign in Roussillon, under the eye of Louis XIII. In the spring of 1643, the King died; and in the autumn of the same year, Turenne received from the Queen Mother and Regent, Anne of Austria, a Marshal’s baton, the appropriate reward of his long and brilliant services. Four years a captain, four a colonel, three Marechal de Camp, five lieutenant-general, he had served in all stations from the ranks upwards, and distinguished himself in them not only by military talent, but by strict honour and trustworthiness, rare virtues in those turbulent times when men were familiar with civil war, and the great nobility were too powerful to be peaceful subjects.

Soon after his promotion, he was sent to Germany, to collect and reorganise the French army, which had been roughly handled at Duttlingen. It wanted rest, men, and money, and he settled it in good quarters, raised recruits, and pledged his own credit for the necessary sums. The effects of his exertions were soon seen. He arrived in Alsace, December, 1643, and in the following May was at the head of 10,000 men, well armed and equipped, with whom he felt strong enough to attack the Imperial army, and raise the siege of Fribourg. At that moment the glory which he hoped and was entitled to obtain, as the reward of five months’ labour, was snatched from him by the arrival of the celebrated Prince de Condè, at that time Duc d’Enghien, to assume the command. The vexation which Turenne must have felt was increased by the difference of age, for the Prince was ten years his junior, and of personal character. Condè was ardent and impetuous, and flushed by his brilliant victory at Rocroi the year before; Turenne cool, calculating, and cautious, unwearied in preparing a certainty of success beforehand, yet prompt in striking when the decisive moment was come. The difference of their characters was exemplified upon this occasion. Merci, the Austrian commander, had taken up a strong position, which Turenne said could not be forced; but at the same time pointed out the means of turning it. Condè differed from him, and the second in command was obliged to submit. On two successive days two bloody and unsuccessful assaults were made: on the third Turenne’s advice was taken, and on the first demonstration of this change of plan Merci retreated. In the following year, ill supplied with every thing, and forced to separate his troops widely to obtain subsistence, he was attacked at Mariendal, and worsted by his old antagonist Merci. This, his first defeat, he felt severely: still he retained his position, and was again ready to meet the enemy, when he received positive orders from Mazarin to undertake nothing before the arrival of Condè. Zealous for his country and careless of personal slights, he marched without complaint under the command of his rival: and his magnanimity was rewarded at the battle of Nordlingen, in 1645, where the centre and right wing having failed in their attack, Turenne with the left wing broke the enemy’s right, and falling on his centre in flank, threw it into utter confusion. For this service he received the most cordial and ample acknowledgments from Condè, both on the field, and in his despatches to the Queen Regent. Soon after, Condè, who was wounded in the battle, resigned his command into the hands of Turenne. The following campaigns of 1646–7–8 exhibited a series of successes, by means of which he drove the Duke of Bavaria from his dominions, and reduced the Emperor to seek for peace. This was concluded at Munster in 1648, and to Turenne’s exertions the termination of the thirty years’ war is mainly to be ascribed.

The repose of France was soon broken by civil war. Mazarin’s administration, oppressive in all respects, but especially in fiscal matters, had produced no small discontent throughout the country, and especially in Paris; where the parliament openly espoused the cause of the people against the minister, and were joined by several of the highest nobility, urged by various motives of private interest or personal pique. Among these were the Prince of Conti, the Duc de Longueville, and the Duc de Bouillon. Mazarin, in alarm, endeavoured to enlist the ambition of Turenne in his favour, by offering the government of Alsace, and the hand of his own niece, as the price of his adherence to the court. The Viscount, pressed by both parties, avoided to declare his adhesion to either: but he unequivocally expressed his disapprobation of the Cardinal’s proceedings, and, being superseded in his command, retired peaceably to Holland. There he remained till the convention of Ruel effected a hollow and insincere reconciliation between the court and one of the jarring parties of which the Fronde was composed. That reconciliation was soon broken by the sudden arrest of Condè, Conti, and the Duc de Longueville. Turenne then threw himself into the arms of the Fronde; urged partly by indignation at this act of violence, partly by a sympathy with the interests of his brother, the Duc de Bouillon; but more, it is said, by a devoted attachment to the Duchesse de Longueville, who turned the great soldier to her purposes, and laughed at his passion. He sold his plate; the Duchess sold her jewels: they concluded an alliance with Spain, and the Viscount was soon at the head of an army. But the heterogeneous mass of Frenchmen, Spaniards, and Germans, melted away during the first campaign; and Turenne, at the head of eight thousand men, found himself obliged to encounter the royal army, twenty thousand strong. In the battle which ensued, he distinguished his personal bravery in several desperate charges: but the disparity was too great; and this defeat of Rhetel was of serious consequence to the Fronde party. Convinced at last that his true interest lay rather on the side of the court, then managed by a woman and a priest, where he might be supreme in military matters, than in supporting the cause of an impetuous and self-willed leader, such as Condè, Turenne gladly listened to overtures of accommodation, and passed over to the support of the regency. His conduct in this war appears to be the most objectionable part of a long and, for that age, singularly honest life. The fault, however, seems to have been rather in espousing, than in abandoning, the cause of the Fronde. Many of that party were doubtless actuated by sincerely patriotic motives. Such, however, were not the motives of Turenne, nor of the nobility to whom he attached himself: and if, in returning to his allegiance, he followed the call of interest as decidedly as he had followed the call of passion in revolting, it was at least a recurrence to his former principle of loyalty, from which, in after-life, he never swerved.

The value of his services was soon made evident. Twice, at the head of very inferior troops, he checked Condè in the career of victory: and again compelled him to fight under the walls of Paris; where, in the celebrated battle of the Faubourg St. Antoine, the Prince and his army narrowly escaped destruction. Finally, he re-established the court at Paris, and compelled Condè to quit the realm. These important events took place in one campaign of six months, in 1652.

In 1654 he again took the field against his former friend and commander, Condè, who had taken refuge in Spain, and now led a foreign army against his country. The most remarkable operation of the campaign was the raising the siege of Arras; which the Spaniards had invested, according to the most approved fashion of the day, with a strong double line of circumvallation, within which the besieging army was supposed to be securely sheltered against the sallies of the garrison cooped up within, and the efforts of their friends from without. Turenne marched to the relief of the place. This could only be effected by forcing the enemy’s entrenchments; which were accordingly attacked, contrary to the opinion of his own officers, and carried at all points, despite the personal exertions of Condè. The Spaniards were forced to retreat. It is remarkable that Turenne, not long after, was himself defeated in precisely similar circumstances, under the walls of Valenciennes, round which he had drawn lines of circumvallation. Once more he found himself in the same position at Dunkirk. On this occasion he marched out of his lines to meet the enemy, rather than wait, and suffer them to choose their point of attack: and the celebrated battle of the Dunes or Sandhills ensued, in which he gained a brilliant victory over the best Spanish troops, with Condè at their head. This took place in 1657. Dunkirk and the greater part of Flanders fell into the hands of the French in consequence; and these successes led to the treaty of the Pyrenees, which terminated the war in 1658.

Turenne’s signal services were appreciated and rewarded by the entire confidence both of the regency, and of Louis himself, after he attained his majority and took the reins of state into his own hands. At the King’s marriage, in 1660, he was created Marshal-General of the French armies, with the significant words, “Il ne tient qu’a vous que ce soit davantage.” The monarch is supposed to have meditated the revival of the high dignity of Constable of France, which could not be held by a Protestant. If this were so, it was a tempting bribe; but it failed. Covetousness was no part of Turenne’s character; and for ambition, his calm and strong mind could not but see that a dignity won by such unworthy means would not elevate him in men’s eyes. We would willingly attribute his conduct to a higher principle; but there is reason to believe that henceforth he rather sought to be converted from the strict tenets of Calvinism in which he had been brought up. It is at least certain, from his correspondence, that about this time he applied himself to theological studies, with which an imperfect education, and a life spent in camps, had little familiarized him; and that in the year 1668 he solemnly renounced the Protestant church. However, he asked and received nothing for himself, and was refused one trifling favour which he requested for his nephew: and perhaps the most fair and probable explanation of his conversion is, that his profession of Calvinism had been habitual and nominal, not founded upon inquiry and conviction; and that in becoming a convert to Catholicism, he had little to give up, while his mind was strongly biassed in favour of the fashionable and established creed.

When war broke out afresh between France and Spain, in 1667, Louis XIV. made his first campaign under Turenne’s guidance, and gained possession of nearly the whole of Flanders. In 1672, when Louis resolved to undertake in person the conquest of Holland, he again placed the command, under himself, in Turenne’s hands, and disgraced several marshals who refused to receive orders from the Viscount, considering themselves his equals in military rank. How Le Grand Monarque forced the passage of the Rhine when there was no army to oppose him, and conquered city after city, till he was stopped by inundations, under the walls of Amsterdam, has been said and sung by his flatterers; and need not be repeated here. But after the King had left the army, when the Princes of Germany came to the assistance of Holland, and her affairs took a more favourable turn under the able guidance of the Prince of Orange, a wider field was offered for the display of Turenne’s talents. In the campaign of 1673 he drove the Elector of Brandenburg, who had come to the assistance of the Dutch, back to Berlin, and compelled him to negotiate for peace. In the same year he was opposed, for the first time, to the Imperial General Montecuculi, celebrated for his military writings, as well as for his exploits in the field. The meeting of these two great generals produced no decisive results.

Turenne returned to Paris in the winter, and was received with the most flattering marks of favour. On the approach of spring, he was sent back to take command of the French army in Alsace, which, amounting to no more than ten thousand men, was pressed by a powerful confederation of the troops of the empire, and those of Brandenburg, once again in the field. Turenne set himself to beat the allies in detail, before they could form a junction. He passed the Rhine, marched forty French leagues in four days, and came up with the Imperialists, under the Duke of Lorraine, at Sintzheim. They occupied a strong position, their wings resting on mountains; their centre protected by a river and a fortified town. Turenne hesitated: it seemed rash to attack; but a victory was needful before the combination of the two armies should render their force irresistible, and he commanded the best troops of France. The event justified his confidence. Every post was carried sword in hand. The Marshal had his horse killed under him, and was slightly wounded. To the officers, who crowded round him with congratulations, he replied, with one of those short and happy speeches which tell upon an army more than the most laboured harangues, “With troops like you, gentlemen, a man ought to attack boldly, for he is sure to conquer.” The beaten army fell back behind the Neckar, where they effected a junction with the troops of Brandenburg: but they dared attempt nothing further, and left the Palatinate in the quiet possession of Turenne. Under his eye, and, as it appears from his own letters, at his express recommendation, as a matter of policy, that wretched country was laid waste to a deplorable extent. This transaction went far beyond the ordinary license of war, and excited general indignation even in that unscrupulous age. It will ever be remembered as a foul stain upon the character of the general who executed, and of the king and minister who ordered or consented to it.

Having carried fire and sword through that part of the Palatinate which lay upon the right or German bank of the Rhine, he crossed that river. But the Imperial troops, reinforced by the Saxons and Hessians to the amount of sixty thousand men, pressed him hard: and it seemed impossible to keep the field against so great a disparity of force; his own troops not amounting to more than twenty thousand. He retreated into Lorraine, abandoning the fertile plains of Alsace to the enemy, led his army behind the Vosges mountains, and crossing them by unfrequented routes, surprised the enemy at Colmar, beat him at Mulhausen and Turkheim, and forced him to recross the Rhine. This is esteemed the most brilliant of Turenne’s campaigns, and it was conceived and conducted with the greater boldness, being in opposition to the orders of Louvois. “I know,” he wrote to that minister, in remonstrating, and indeed refusing to follow his directions, “I know the strength of the Imperialists, their generals, and the country in which we are. I take all upon myself, and charge myself with whatever may occur.”

Returning to Paris at the end of the campaign, his journey through France resembled a triumphal progress; such was the popular enthusiasm in his favour. Not less flattering was his reception by the King, whose undeviating regard and confidence, undimmed by jealousy or envy, is creditable alike to the monarch and to his faithful subject. At this time Turenne, it is said, had serious thoughts of retiring to a convent, and was induced only by the earnest remonstrances of the King, and his representations of the critical state of France, to resume his command. Returning to the Upper Rhine, he was again opposed to Montecuculi. For two months the resources and well-matched skill of the rival captains were displayed in a series of marches and counter-marches, in which every movement was so well foreseen and guarded against, that no opportunity occurred for coming to action with advantage to either side. At last the art of Turenne appeared to prevail; when, not many minutes after he had expressed the full belief that victory was in his grasp, a cannon-ball struck him while engaged in reconnoitring the enemy’s position, previous to giving battle, and he fell dead from his horse, July 27th, 1675. The same shot carried off the arm of St. Hilaire, commander-in-chief of the artillery. “Weep not for me,” said the brave soldier to his son, “it is for that great man that we ought to weep.”

His subordinates possessed neither the talents requisite to follow up his plans, nor the confidence of the troops, who perceived their hesitation, and were eager to avenge the death of their beloved general. “Loose the piebald,” so they named Turenne’s horse, was the cry; “he will lead us on.” But those on whom the command devolved thought of nothing less than of attacking the enemy; and after holding a hurried council of war, retreated in all haste across the Rhine.

The Swabian peasants let the spot where he fell lie fallow for many years, and carefully preserved a tree under which he had been sitting just before. Strange that the people who had suffered so much at his hands, should regard his memory with such respect.

The character of Turenne was more remarkable for solidity than for brilliancy. Many generals may have been better qualified to complete a campaign by one decisive blow; few probably have laid the scheme of a campaign with more judgment, or shown more skill and patience in carrying their plans into effect. And it is remarkable that, contrary to general experience, he became much more enterprising in advanced years than he had been in youth. Of that impetuous spirit, which sometimes carries men to success where caution would have hesitated and failed, he possessed little. In his earlier years he seldom ventured to give battle, except where victory was nearly certain: but a course of victory inspired confidence, and trained by long practice to distinguish the difficult from the impossible, he adopted in his later campaigns a bolder style of tactics than had seemed congenial to his original temper. In this respect he offered a remarkable contrast to his rival in fame, Condè, who, celebrated in early life for the headlong valour, even to rashness, of his enterprises, became in old age prudent almost to timidity. Equally calm in success or in defeat, Turenne was always ready to prosecute the one, or to repair the other. And he carried the same temper into private life, where he was distinguished for the dignity with which he avoided quarrels, under circumstances in which lesser men would have found it hard to do so, without incurring the reproach of cowardice. Nor must we pass over his thorough honesty and disinterestedness in pecuniary matters; a quality more rare in a great man then than it is now.

In 1653 he married the daughter of the Duc de la Force. She died in 1666, without leaving children.

Turenne composed memoirs of his own life, which are published in the Life of him by the Chevalier Ramsay. There is also a collection of his Military Maxims, by Captain Williamson. In 1782 Grimoard published his ‘Collection des Memoirs du Marechal de Turenne.’ Deschamps, an officer who served under him, wrote a full account of his two last campaigns; and the history of his four last campaigns has been published under the name of Beaurain. We may also refer the reader for the history of these times to Voltaire, Siècle de Louis XIV.

BOYLE

This excellent and accomplished person was one of those who do honour to high birth and ample fortune, by employing them, not as the means of selfish gratification or personal aggrandisement, but in the furtherance of every useful pursuit, and every benevolent purpose. By the lover of science he is honoured as one of the first and most successful cultivators of experimental philosophy; to the Christian his memory is endeared, as that of one, who, in the most licentious period of English history, showed a rare example of religion and virtue in exalted station, and was an early and zealous promoter of the diffusion of the Scriptures in foreign lands.

Robert Boyle was the youngest son but one of a statesman eminent in the successive reigns of Elizabeth, and the first James and Charles; and well known in Ireland by the honourable title of the Great Earl of Cork. He has left an unfinished sketch of his own early life, in which he assumes the name of Philaretus, a lover of virtue; and speaks of his childhood as characterized by two things, a more than usual inclination to study, and a rigid observance of truth in all things. He was born in Ireland, January 25, 1626–7. In his ninth year he was sent, with his elder brother Francis, to Eton, where he spent between three and four years: in the early part of which, under the guidance of an able and judicious tutor, he made great progress both in the acquisition of knowledge, and in forming habits of accurate and diligent inquiry. But his studies were interrupted by a severe ague; and while recovering from that disorder he contracted a habit of desultory reading, which it afterwards cost him some pains to conquer by a laborious course of mathematical calculations. During his abode at Eton several remarkable escapes from imminent peril occurred to him, upon which, in after-life, he looked back with reverential gratitude, and with the full conviction that the direct hand of an overruling providence was to be traced in them.

_Engraved by R. Woodman._

ROBERT BOYLE.

_From an original Picture, in the possession of Lord Dover._

Under the Superintendance of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful
Knowledge.

_London. Published by Charles Knight, Pall Mall East._
]

Towards the close of 1637, as it should seem, his father, who had purchased the manor of Stalbridge, in Dorsetshire, took him home. In October, 1638, he was sent abroad, under the charge of a governor, with his brother Francis. They visited France, Switzerland, and Italy; and Philaretus’s narrative of his travels is not without interest. 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, farther 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. On the breaking out of the rebellion in 1642, the troubled state of England, and the death of the Earl of Cork, involved the brothers in considerable pecuniary difficulties. They returned to England in 1644, and Robert, after a short delay, took possession of the manor of Stalbridge, which, with a considerable property in Ireland, had been bequeathed to him by his father. By the interest of his brother and sister, Lord Broghill and Lady Ranelagh, who were on good terms with the ruling party, he obtained protections for his property, and for the next six years made Stalbridge his principal abode. This portion of his life was chiefly spent in the study of ethical and natural philosophy; and his name began already to be respected among the men of science of the day.

In 1652 he went to Ireland to look after his property, and spent the greater part of the next two years there. Returning to England in 1654, he settled at Oxford. 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.

At the restoration, Boyle was treated with great respect by the King; and was strongly pressed to enter the church by Lord Clarendon, who thought that his high birth, eminent learning, and exemplary character might be of material service to the revived establishment. After serious consideration he declined the proposal, upon two accounts, as he told Burnet; first, because he thought that while he performed no ecclesiastical duties, and received no pay, his testimony in favour of religion would carry more weight; secondly, because he felt no especial vocation to take holy orders, which he considered indispensable to the proper entering into that service.

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; 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 the year 1666 he took up his abode in London, where he continued for the remainder of his life. We have little more to state of his personal history. He was elected President of the Royal Society in 1680, but declined that well-earned honour, as having, in his own words, “a great (and perhaps peculiar) tenderness in point of oaths.” In the course of 1688 he began to feel his strength decline, and set himself seriously to complete those of his undertakings which he judged most important, and to arrange such of his papers as required to be prepared for publication. It gives us rather a curious notion of the scientific morality of the day, to learn that he had been a great sufferer by the stealing of his papers. Such at least was his own belief, hinted in a public advertisement, and expressed more fully in his private communications. His manuscript books disappeared in an incomprehensible way, insomuch that he resolved to write upon loose sheets of paper, “that the ignorance of the coherence might keep men from thinking them worth stealing.” Notwithstanding he complains of numerous losses, and expresses a determination to secure the “remaining part of his writings, especially those that contain most matters of fact, by sending them maimed and unfinished, as they come to hand, to the press.” A still more serious loss occurred to him through the carelessness of a servant, who broke a bottle of vitriol over a box of manuscripts prepared for publication, by which a large part of them were utterly ruined. To these misfortunes, the non-appearance of many promised works, and the imperfect state of others, is to be ascribed. During the years 1689–90, he gradually withdrew himself more and more from his other employments, and from the claims of society, to devote himself entirely to the preparation of his papers. He died, unmarried, December 31, 1691, aged sixty-five years, and was buried in the chancel of St. Martin’s-in-the-fields.

To give merely the dates and titles of Boyle’s several publications, would occupy several pages. They are collected in five volumes folio, by Dr. Birch, and amount in number to ninety-seven. The philosophical works have been abridged in three volumes quarto by Dr. Shaw, who has prefixed to his edition a character of the author, and of his works. From 1660 to the end of his life, every year brought fresh evidence of his close application to science, and the versatility of his talents, and the extent of his knowledge. His attention was directed to chemistry, mathematics, mechanics, medicine, anatomy; but more especially to the former, in its many branches: and though he is not altogether free from the reproach of credulity, and appears not to have entirely freed himself from the delusions of the alchymists, still he did more towards overthrowing their mischievous doctrines, and establishing his favourite science on a firm foundation, than any man; and his indefatigable diligence in inquiry, and unquestioned honesty of relation, entitle him to a very high place among the fathers of modern chemistry. On this point we may quote the testimony of the celebrated Boerhaave, (Chemistry, vol. i. p. 55,) who says, that among the writers who have treated of Chemistry with a view to natural philosophy and medicine, we may reckon among the chief, the Hon. Robert Boyle. Redi also, in his ‘Experimenta Naturalia,’ affirms that in experimental philosophy there never was any man so distinguished, and that perhaps there never will be his equal in discovering natural causes.

It is, however, as the father of pneumatic philosophy that his scientific fame is most securely based. To the invention of the air-pump he possesses no claim, an instrument of that sort having been exhibited in 1654 by Otto Guericke of Magdeburg: but his improvements, and his well-combined and ingenious experiments first made that instrument of value, and proved the elasticity of the air. These were given to the world in his first published, and perhaps his most important work, entitled, ‘New Experiments upon the Spring of the Air.’

A considerable portion of Boyle’s works is occupied by religious treatises. Two of these, ‘Seraphic Love,’ and a ‘Free Discourse against Swearing,’ were written before he had reached the age of twenty; though not published for many years after. He established by his will an annual lecture, “in proof of the Christian religion against notorious infidels.” Bentley was the first preacher on this foundation.

Boyle’s funeral sermon was preached by Bishop Burnet, who had been under some obligation to him for assistance in publishing his History of the Reformation. The sermon has been considered one of Burnet’s best; and it has this advantage, that funeral panegyric has seldom been more sincerely and honestly bestowed. We conclude by quoting one or two passages, which illustrate the beauty of Boyle’s private character. “He had brought his mind to such a freedom that he was not apt to be imposed on; and his modesty was such that he did not dictate to others; but proposed his own sense with a due and decent distrust, and was ever very ready to hearken to what was suggested to him by others. When he differed from any, he expressed himself in so humble and obliging a way that he never treated things or persons with neglect, and I never heard that he offended any one person in his whole life by any part of his demeanour. For if at any time he saw cause to speak roundly to any, it was never in passion, or with any reproachful or indecent expressions. And as he was careful to give those who conversed with him no cause or colour for displeasure, he was yet more careful of those who were absent, never to speak ill of any, in which he was the exactest man I ever knew. If the discourse turned to be hard on any, he was presently silent; and if the subject was too long dwelt on, he would at last interpose, and, between reproof and raillery, divert it.

“He was exactly civil, even to ceremony, and though he felt his easiness of access, and the desires of many, all strangers in particular, to be much with him, made great waste of his time; yet, as he was severe in that, not to be denied when he was at home, so he said he knew the heart of a stranger, and how much eased his own had been, while travelling, if admitted to the conversation of those he desired to see; therefore he thought his obligation to strangers was more than bare civility; it was a piece of religious charity in him.

“He had, for almost forty years, laboured under such a feebleness of body, and such lowness of strength and spirits, that it will appear a surprising thing to imagine how it was possible for him to read, to meditate, to try experiments, and write as he did. He bore all his infirmities, and some sharp pains, with the decency and submission that became a Christian and philosopher. He had about him all that unaffected neglect of pomp in clothes, lodging, furniture, and equipage, which agreed with his grave and serious course of life. He was advised to a very ungrateful simplicity of diet, which, by all appearance, was that which preserved him so long beyond all men’s expectation. This he observed so strictly, that in the course of above thirty years he neither ate nor drank to gratify the varieties of appetite, but merely to support nature; and was so regular in it, that he never once transgressed the rule, measure and kind that were prescribed him. * * *

“His knowledge was of so vast an extent, that were it not for the variety of vouchers in their several sort, I should be afraid to say all I know. He carried the study of Hebrew very far into the Rabbinical writings and the other Oriental languages. He had read so much out of the Fathers, that he had formed out of it a clear judgment of all the eminent ones. He had read a vast deal on the Scriptures, and had gone very nicely through the whole controversies on religion, and was a true master of the whole body of divinity. He read the whole compass of the mathematical sciences; and though he did not set himself to spring any new game, yet he knew even the abstrusest parts of geometry. Geography, in the several parts of it that related to navigation or travelling, history, and books of travels, were his diversions. He went very nicely through all the parts of physic; only the tenderness of his nature made him less able to endure the exactness of anatomical dissections, especially of living animals, though he knew them to be most instructive. But for the history of nature, ancient or modern, of the productions of all countries, of the virtues and improvements of plants, of ores and minerals, and all the varieties that are in them in different climates, he was by much, by very much, the readiest and perfectest I ever knew, in the greatest compass, and with the truest exactness. This put him in the way of making that vast variety of experiments, beyond any man, as far as we know, that ever lived. And in these, as he made a great progress in new discoveries, so he used so nice a strictness, and delivered them with so scrupulous a truth, that all who have examined them, may find how safely the world may depend upon them. But his peculiar and favourite study was chemistry, in which he engaged with none of those ravenous and ambitious designs that draw many into them. His design was only to find out Nature, to see into what principles things might be resolved, and of what they were compounded, and to prepare good medicaments for the bodies of men. He spent neither his time nor his fortune upon the vain pursuits of high promises and pretensions. He always kept himself within the compass that his estate might well bear. And as he made chemistry much the better for his dealing with it, so he never made himself either the worse, or the poorer for it.”

It would be easy to multiply testimonies of the high reputation in which Boyle was held: indeed the reader will find numerous instances collected in the article Boyle, in Dr. Kippis’s Biographia Britannica, the perusal of which will amply gratify the reader’s curiosity. Still more detailed accounts of Boyle’s life and character will be found in other works to which we have already referred, especially in Dr. Birch’s Life.

_Engraved by E. Scriven._

SIR ISAAC NEWTON.

_From the original Picture by Vanderbank in the possession of the
Royal Society._

Under the Superintendance of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful
Knowledge.

_London. Published by Charles Knight, Pall Mall East._
]

NEWTON

Isaac Newton was born on Christmas-day, 1642 (O. S.), at Woolsthorpe, a hamlet in the parish of Colsterworth, in Lincolnshire. In that spot his family had possessed a small estate for more than a hundred years; and his father died there a few months after his marriage to Harriet Ayscough, and before the birth of his son. The widow soon married again, and removed to North Witham, the rectory of her second husband, Mr. Smith, leaving her son, a weakly child who had not been expected to live through the earliest infancy, under the charge of her mother.

Newton’s education was commenced at the parish school, and at the age of twelve he was sent to Grantham for classical instruction. At first he was idle, but soon rose to the head of the school. The peculiar bent of his mind soon showed itself in his recreations. He was fond of drawing, and sometimes wrote verses; but he chiefly amused himself with mechanical contrivances. Among these was a model of a wind-mill, turned either by the wind, or by a mouse enclosed in it, which he called the miller; a mechanical carriage moved by the person who sat in it; and a water-clock, which was long used in the family of Mr. Clarke, an apothecary, with whom he boarded at Grantham. This was not his only method of measuring time: the house at Woolsthorpe, whither he returned at the age of fifteen, still contains dials made by him during his residence there.

Mr. Smith died in 1656, and his widow then returned to Woolsthorpe with her three children by her second marriage. She brought Newton himself also thither, in the hope that he might be useful in the management of the farm. This expectation was fortunately disappointed. When sent to Grantham on business, he used to leave its execution to the servant who accompanied him, and passed his time in reading, sometimes by the way-side, sometimes at the house of Mr. Clark. His mother no longer opposed the evident tendency of his disposition. He returned to school at Grantham, and was removed thence in his eighteenth year to Trinity College, Cambridge.

The 5th of June, 1660, was the day of his admission as a sizer into that distinguished society. He applied himself eagerly to the study of mathematics, and mastered its difficulties with an ease and rapidity which he was afterwards inclined almost to regret, from an opinion that a closer attention to its elementary parts would have improved the elegance of his own methods of demonstration. In 1664 he became a scholar of his college, and in 1667 was elected to a fellowship, which he retained beyond the regular time of its expiration in 1675, by a special dispensation authorizing him to hold it without taking orders.

It is necessary to return to an earlier date, to trace the series of Newton’s discoveries. This is not the occasion for a minute enumeration of them, or for any elaborate discussion of their value or explanation of their principles; but their history and succession require some notice. The earliest appear to have related to pure mathematics. The study of Dr. Wallis’s works led him to investigate certain properties of series, and this course of research soon conducted him to the celebrated Binomial Theorem. The exact date of his invention of the method of Fluxions is not known; but it was anterior to 1666, when the breaking out of the plague obliged him for a time to quit Cambridge, and consequently when he was only about twenty-three years old.

This change of residence interrupted his optical researches, in which he had already laid the foundation of his great discoveries. He had decomposed light into the coloured rays of which it is compounded, and having thus ascertained the principal cause of the confusion of the images formed by refraction, he had turned his attention to the construction of telescopes which should act by reflection, and be free from this evil. He had not, however, overcome the practical difficulties of his undertaking, when his retreat from Cambridge for a time stopped this train of experiment and invention.

On quitting Cambridge Newton retired to Woolsthorpe, where his mind was principally employed upon the system of the world. The theory of Copernicus and the discoveries of Galileo and Kepler had at length furnished the materials from which the true system was to be deduced. It was indeed all involved in Kepler’s celebrated laws. The equable description of areas proved the existence of a central force; the elliptical form of the planetary orbits, and the relation between their magnitude and the time occupied in describing them, ascertained the law of its variation. But no one had arisen to demonstrate these necessary consequences, or even to conjecture the universal principle from which they were derived. The existence of a central force had been surmised, and the law of its action guessed at; but no proof had been given of either, and little attention had been awakened by the conjecture.

Newton’s discovery appears to have been quite independent of any speculations of his predecessors. The circumstances attending it are well known: the very spot in which it first dawned upon him is ascertained. He was sitting in the garden at Woolsthorpe, when the fall of an apple called his attention to the force which caused its descent, to the probable limits of its action and law of its operation. Its power was not sensibly diminished at any distance at which experiments had been made: might it not then extend to the moon and guide that luminary in her orbit? It was certain that her motion was regulated in the same manner as that of the planets round the sun: if, therefore, the law of the sun’s action could be ascertained, that by which the earth acted would also be found by analogy. Newton, therefore, proceeded to ascertain by calculation from the known elements of the planetary orbits, the law of the sun’s action. The great experiment remained: the trial whether the moon’s motions showed the force acting upon her to correspond with the theoretical amount of terrestrial gravity at her distance. The result was disappointment. The trial was to be made by ascertaining the exact space by which the earth’s action turned the moon aside from her course in a given time. This depended on her actual distance from the earth, which was only known by comparison with the earth’s diameter. The received estimate of that quantity was very erroneous; it proceeded on the supposition that a degree of latitude was only sixty English miles, nearly a seventh part less than its actual length. The calculation of the moon’s distance and of the space described by her, gave results involved in the same proportion of error; and thus the space actually described appeared to be a seventh part less than that which corresponded to the theory. It was not Newton’s habit to force the results of experiments into conformity with hypothesis. He could not, indeed, abandon his leading idea, which rested, in the case of the planetary motions, on something very nearly amounting to demonstration. But it seemed that some modification was required before it could be applied to the moon’s motion, and no satisfactory solution of the difficulty occurred. The scheme therefore was incomplete, and, in conformity with his constant habit of producing nothing till it was fully matured, Newton kept it undivulged for many years.

On his return to Cambridge Newton again applied himself to the construction of reflecting telescopes, and succeeded in effecting it in 1668. In the following year Dr. Barrow resigned in his favour the Lucasian professorship of mathematics, which Newton continued to hold till the year 1703, when Whiston, who had been his deputy from 1699, succeeded him in the chair. On January 11, 1672, Newton was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. He was then best known by the invention of the reflecting telescope; but immediately on his election he communicated to the Society the particulars of his theory of light, on which he had already delivered three courses of lectures at Cambridge, and they were shortly afterwards published in the Philosophical Transactions.

It is impossible here to state the various phenomena of light and colours which were first detected and explained by Newton. They entirely changed the science of optics, and every advance which has since been made in it has only added to the importance and confirmed the value of his observations. The success of the new theory was complete. Newton, however, was much vexed and harassed by the discussions which it occasioned. The annoyance which he thus experienced made him even think of abandoning the pursuit of science, and although it failed to withdraw him from the studies to which he was devoted, it confirmed him in his unwillingness to publish their results.