minister of the Gospel. The prospects of ecclesiastical preferment had no effect on such a mind as his; and his continued refusal of the peerage, which Charles the Second, James the Second, and William the Third, all three successively offered him, is another convincing proof of how free he was from all ordinary ambition.

From 1663, Boyle resided in London until his death, in 1691. He had his set hours for receiving literary and scientific visitors; and Bishop Burnet says that his fame, even in his lifetime, was so great, that it reached very distant countries, whither his books reached also; and this drew on him a multitude of visits at home, which, however inconvenient, he bore as long as his health would permit, from the remembrance, he said, of the satisfaction he had received when admitted to the sight of such as he had an inclination to converse with when abroad. In this he succeeded to the honours that were paid to the great Lord Bacon, whom foreigners used to visit as the glory of this country.

The Provostship of Eton was offered to Boyle, without his solicitation or request, by King Charles the Second, on the death of Dr. Meredith, in 1665. No dignified situation could have been better adapted for the prosecution of Boyle's studies, and none could have been more congenial to his feelings; but he declined it, from a conscientious conviction that it ought only to be filled by a person in holy orders.

It is remarkable, that in the latter part of this century the two royal foundations of King Henry the Sixth had the two greatest philosophers of the age nominated as their respective heads, but that in neither case was the nomination carried into effect. Boyle's conscientious scruples as to holy orders prevented him from becoming Provost of Eton; and the resolution of the Fellows of King's, in 1689, to exert their right of independent election of their Provost, and no longer receive nominees of the Crown, hindered King's from acquiring as her Provost, in that year, Sir Isaac Newton, whom King William had nominated on the death of Provost Roderick.

The last of Boyle's works, which appeared in his lifetime, was his EXPERIMENTA ET OBSERVATIONES PHYSICE, which appeared in the spring of 1691. In that year his health began to fail. His favourite sister, the Lady Ranelagh,-with whom he had lived for many years, and who was endeared to him as a companion and valuable friend, by reason of her accomplishments and intellectual

powers, as well as by her affectionate attentions, died in the December of 1691; and Boyle soon followed her to the grave. He expired on the last day of that year, and was buried by her side on the 7th of July following, in the church of St. Martin's-in-theFields, Westminster.

Boyle's tolerant spirit in judging of differences in religion has been mentioned, and his avoidance of mingling in any of the civil conflicts of his age. But though mild and retiring in disposition, Boyle was not one who shrunk from speaking the truth when occasion required, though at the risk of offending men in power; nor did his toleration spring from indifference. An anecdote is preserved of him, of which, as the writer of his life in the Biographia Britannica says, it would be an injury to his fame not to take notice.

"As great as Mr. Boyle's moderation and charity was in respect to all the different sects in which Christianity was divided, yet he was a constant member of the Church of England, and went to no separate assemblies: but, sometime before the Restoration, either out of curiosity, or, perhaps, from some more weighty motive, he went to Sir Henry Vane's house in order to hear him, who, at that time, was at the head of a new sect, who called themselves Seekers: neither was this visit of his attended with any disappointment, for he there heard him preach, in a large thronged room, a long sermon on the text of Dan. xii. 2: And many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt. The whole scope of Sir Henry's sermon was to show, that many doctrines of religion that had long been dead and buried in the world, should, before the end of it, be awakened into life, and that many false doctrines, being then likewise revived, should, by the power of truth, be then doomed to shame and everlasting contempt. When Sir Henry had concluded his discourse, Mr. Boyle spoke to this effect to him before the people: That being informed that in such private meetings it was not uncustomary for any one of the hearers who was unsatisfied about any matters there uttered, to give in his objections against them, and to prevent any mistakes in the speakers or hearers, he thought himself obliged, for the honour of God's truth, to say, that this place in Daniel; being the clearest one in all the Old Testament for the proof of the resurrection, we ought not to suffer the meaning of it to eva

porate into allegory; and the rather, since that inference is made by our Saviour in the New Testament, by way of asserting the resurrection from that place of Daniel in the Old: and that, if it should be denied that the plain and genuine meaning of those words in the Prophet is to assert the resurrection of dead bodies, he was ready to prove it to be so, both out of the words of the text and context in the original language, and from the best expositors both Christian and Jewish but that, if this be not denied, and Sir Henry's discourse of the resurrection of doctrines, true and false, was designed by him only in the way of occasional meditations from those words in Daniel, and not to enervate the literal sense as the genuine one, then he had nothing farther to say. Mr. Boyle then sitting down, Sir Henry rose up and said, that his discourse was only in the way of such occasional meditations, which he thought edifying to the people; and declared that he agreed that the literal sense of the words was the resurrection of dead bodies: and so that meeting broke up. Mr. Boyle afterwards, speaking of this conference to Sir Peter Pett, observed, that Sir Henry Vane, at that time, being in the height of his authority in the State, and his auditors at that meeting consisting chiefly of dependants on him and expectants from him, the fear of losing his favour would, probably, have restrained them from contradicting any of his interpretations of Scripture, how ridiculous soever. 'But I (said Mr. Boyle) having no little awes of that kind upon me, thought myself bound to enter the lists with him, as I did, that the sense of the Scriptures might not be depraved.''

Boyle's character among scientific men, after having been at one time somewhat exaggerated, has afterwards by the customary reaction been unfairly depreciated. In order to arrive at a right standard, I quite concur with the writer of the excellent article on him in Knight's Cyclopædia, that "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. 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 sunk 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 sprung, 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." (Life prefixed to Works.-Biog. Brit.-Biographie Universelle.-Knight's Cyclopædia.)

HENRY MORE.

COLERIDGE has said that every man is naturally either a Platonist or an Aristotelian. It is only to those who feel themselves included in the first branch of this classification, that I can look for participation in the earnest interest which I have felt in examining the life and writings of Henry More. He is a remarkable instance of the high and holy influences of the Platonic philosophy when combined with the Christian faith. He was not exempt from weaknesses, but his weaknesses serve to show more fully his sincerity, and to set him in a more amiable light. Many of his writings are too enthusiastic, and many of his speculations too visionary, for most readers; and his works are too voluminous for their full popularity ever to be revived at the present time. Yet I cannot but think that a collection of extracts from some of them, and a condensation of others, would form admirable treatises for general diffusion. Still more sure do I feel of the beneficial effects which a judicious selection of translated portions from Plato's own writings would produce, if such a book could be largely circulated in this our utilitarian and rationalising age.

HENRY MORE was born at Grantham, in Lincolnshire, on the 12th of October, 1614. He was sent to Eton at the age of fourteen, and after being educated there for some years, he proceeded to Christ's College, Cambridge, where, in the seclusion of a college life, he devoted his youth, his manhood, and old age, to intense study and undisturbed metaphysical speculation.

We possess in the preface prefixed to More's first philosophical volume, a curious and valuable autobiography of his boyhood, and of the earlier portion of his youth. The candid history and frank self-anatomy of an individual human mind must be always an interesting document to the psychologist. Such is peculiarly the case where it is such a mind as More's, of which we are thus enabled to trace the development.

It will be seen, from the portions of this narrative which I am about to quote, that More was trained up in the creed of ultraCalvinism; that ghastly doctrine, of which none but a hardhearted man can become a disciple, without feeling that

“Quæsivit lucem cœlo, ingemuitque repertâ.”