The Life of John Milton Volume 3 1643-1649 / Narrated in Connexion with the Political, Ecclesiastical, and Literary History of His Time

by David Masson

EDUCATIONAL REFORM STILL A QUESTION: HARTLIB AGAIN: THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: YOUNG ROBERT BOYLE AND WILLIAM PETTY.

There may be something in Phillips's guess that his uncle, about 1647, had some idea of putting in practice his system of Pedagogy on a larger scale than a mere private house permitted, by becoming the head of some such public Academy as that which he had described three years before in his Letter to Hartlib.

The question of a Reform of the apparatus for national Education had never quite vanished from the public mind even in the midst of the engrossing struggle between the Presbyterians and the Independents, and a fresh interest was imparted to the subject by the Ordinance of Parliament in May 1647 for a Visitation and Purgation of the University of Oxford (antè, pp. 545-6). Hartlib, for one, was again on the top of the wave. The claims of this indefatigable man to some reward for his long and various services had at length been brought before Parliament. On the 25th of June, 1646, on the report of a Committee, the House of Commons had voted him 100_l._ and in April 1647 the two Houses farther agreed in a resolution to pay him 300_l._ "in consideration of his good deserts and great services to the Parliament," with a recommendation that, on account of his special merits "from all that are well-wishers to the advancement of learning," he should be provided with some post of emolument at Oxford. [Footnote: Commons Journals of June 25, 1646, and March 31, 1647; and Lords Journals of April 1, 1647.] Nothing came of the last suggestion, and Hartlib lived on in London as before, still only ventilating his ideas of Educational Reform in a general way, amid the other novelties of all sorts which he patronized.

Hartlib's hero-in-chief on the Educational subject, the great Comenius, though doubtless remembered, had practically gone out of view. Labouring at Elbing on that piece of mere drudgery for which Oxenstiern and others had persuaded him to lay aside his Pansophic dreams (antè, p. 228), he had indeed compiled, in four years, a large recast of his Latin Didactics under the title of Novissima Linguarum Methodus, and had returned to Sweden in 1646 to present the mass of manuscript to his employer Ludovicus de Geer. The Swedish critics do not seem to have yet been satisfied with the performance, and Comenius had carried it away with him again for corrections and additions, not any longer in Elbing, but in his old Polish home. [Footnote: Comenius's Preface to the Second Part of his Opera Didactica, between 1627 and 1657.] No chance for Hartlib, then, of co-operating again with Comenius in the foundation of a Pansophic College in London! Hartlib's faculty of making new acquaintances, however, was as versatile as his passion for new lights; and a certain "Invisible College" which had already some habitat in London, had become the substitute in his fancies for the unbuilt Pansophic Temple of the distant Slavonian sage. Since 1645 there had been held, sometimes in Wood Street, sometimes in Cheapside, and sometimes in Gresham College, those humble weekly meetings of a few "worthy persons inquisitive into Natural Philosophy," out of which there grew at length the great Royal Society of London. Theodore Haak, a naturalized German, had originated the club; and among the first members were Dr. John Wallis (the clerk of the Westminster Assembly, but with other things in his head than what went on there), the afterwards famous Wilkins, and the physician Dr. Jonathan Goddard. If Hartlib, the fellow-countryman and friend of Haak, was not an original member, he knew of the meetings from the first; and the Invisible College of his imagination seems to have been that enlarged future association of all earnest spirits for the prosecution of real and fruitful knowledge of which this club might be the symbol and promise. The Invisible College, at all events, was the temporary form of his ever-varying, and yet indestructible, zeal for progress. It figures much in his correspondence at this time with one new friend, who, though not more than twenty years of age, had that in him which made his friendship as precious to Hartlib as any he had yet formed. This was young Robert Boyle, recently returned to England from his foreign travels, and dividing his time between philosophical retirement at his house in Dorsetshire and occasional visits to London. In a letter to a Cambridge friend written in Feb. 1646-7, during one of those London visits, Boyle says: "I have been every day these two months upon visiting my own ruined cottage in the country; but it is such a labyrinth, this London, that all my diligence could never yet find my way out on't…. The cornerstones of the Invisible, or, as they term themselves, Philosophical College, do now and then honour me with their company, which makes me as sorry for those pressing occasions that urge my departure as I am at other times angry with that solicitous idleness that I am necessitated to during my stay: men of so capacious and searching spirits that school-philosophy is but the lowest region of their knowledge, and yet, though ambitious to lead the way to any generous design, of so humble and teachable a genius as they disdain not to be directed by the meanest, so he can but plead reason for his opinion,—persons that endeavour to put narrowmindedness out of countenance, by the practice of so extensive a charity that it reaches unto everything called man, and nothing less than an universal goodwill can content it. … I will conclude their praises with the recital of their chiefest fault, which is very incident to almost all good things; and that is that there is not enough of them." The first extant letters of Boyle to Hartlib were written from his Dorsetshire retreat immediately after this visit to London, and are in reply to letters received there from Hartlib. A new system of Real characters or Universal Writing; Pneumatical Engines or Wind-guns; Mr. Durie, his Church-conciliation Scheme, and a Discourse on the Teaching of Logic he had brought out; the ingenious Utopian Speculations of a certain young Mr. Hall; the Copernican Astronomy (to which Mr. Boyle was "once very much inclined"); the French mathematicians, Mersenne and Gassendi; Oughtred's Clavis Mathematica; a Cure for the Stone suggested by Hartlib, or rather by Mrs. Hartlib: such are some of the topics of the correspondence, but with the Invisible College irradiating all. Thus, May 8, 1647, Boyle, writing to Mr. Hartlib, to congratulate him on the 300_l._ he had been voted by Parliament, says: "You interest yourself so much in the Invisible College, and that whole society is so highly concerned in all the accidents of your life, that you can send me no intelligence of your own affairs that does not, at least relationally, assume the nature of Utopian." In the same letter Boyle expresses his anxiety to have a copy of a pamphlet of Hartlib's which had just appeared. He names it rather vaguely; but I have ascertained it to be "A Briefe Discourse concerning the Accomplishment of our Reformation: tending to shew that by an Office of Publicke Address in spirituall and temporall matters the Glory of God and the Happiness of this Nation may be greatly advanced." It consisted of a preface, addressed by Hartlib to Parliament, and 59 pages of text, explaining the said Office of Public Address to be a kind of universal Register House "whereunto all men might freely come to give information of the commodities they have to be imparted to others." The pamphlet was out in May 1647. [Footnote: Birch's Life of Boyle, pp. 20-25; Worthington's Diary by Crossley, 1. 313; and copy of Hartlib's pamphlet in the British Museum, with MS. note of date of publication.]

While Hartlib was writing on all things and sundry to young Boyle, the Education subject included, there was another new acquaintance of his, only three years older than Boyle, with whom he seems to have been discussing the Education subject more expressly. William Petty, afterwards so famous as "the universal genius, Sir William Petty," had returned from France at the age of twenty-three. The considerable stock of knowledge which he had taken abroad with him when he left his native Hampshire, eight years before, a pushing boy of fifteen, had been increased by his studies at foreign Universities, his readings with Hobbes in Paris, his commercial dealings, and his inquisitiveness into the processes of all trades and handicrafts by which men earn their livings. He came back a tall, slender youth, with a very large head, to be spoken of in London as an encyclopædia of information, a wonderful mathematician and mechanician, teeming with schemes of all sorts, and yet shrewd, practical, and business-like. He was an invaluable addition to the Invisible College, and a delightful discovery for Hartlib; and he took to Hartlib at once, as every one else did. What occupied him especially at the moment was a machine for double writing, i.e. for making two copies of any writing at once. He hoped to obtain a patent for this invention from Parliament; and such a patent, for seventeen years, he did obtain in March 1647-8. While the thing was in progress, however, Hartlib was his chief confidant. This appears from a tract of his, of 26 pages, published Jan. 8, 1647-8, and entitled "The Advice of W. P. to Mr. Samuel Hartlib for the advancement of some particular parts of Learning." The invention for double writing is described in the tract, but it also sets forth Petty's ideas on Hartlib's favourite subject of a Reformation of Schools. In fact, in any collection of seventeenth-century tracts on that subject, it ought to be bound up with Hartlib's own older tracts in exposition of Comenius, and with the Letter on Education which Hartlib had elicited from Milton in 1644. Petty's notions, as may be supposed, differ considerably from Milton's. He is for a universal education in what he calls Ergastula Literaria or Literary Workhouses, "where children may be taught as well to do something toward their living as to read and write;" and, though he does not undervalue reading and writing, or book-culture generally, he lays the stress rather on mathematical and physical science, manual dexterity, and acquaintance with useful arts and inventions. Besides reading and writing, he would have all children taught drawing and designing; he would rather discourage the learning of languages, both because people may have all the books they want in their mother-tongue, and because the use of real characters, or an ideographic system of writing, would lessen the necessity of knowing foreign tongues; but, so far as languages might have to be learnt, their acquisition, as well as that of the simple arts of reading and writing, might be much facilitated by improved methods. In short, in Petty's project of Education, with much of the same general spirit of innovation, utilitarianism, contempt of tradition, as in Milton's, there is a characteristic difference of detail and even of principle. You are to be made expert in "graving, etching, carving, embossing, and moulding in sundry matters," in "grinding of glasses dioptrical and catoptrical," in "navarchy and making models for building and rigging of ships," in "anatomy, making skeletons, and excarnating bowels;" but you miss all that Milton would have taught you of Latin and Greek, Poetry and Philosophy, Italian and Hebrew, moral magnanimity and spiritual elevation, the History of Nations, and the ways of God to men. [Footnote: Wood's Ath., IV. 214; Worthington's Diary by Crossley, I. 294- 8; and Pett's own Tract. On its title-page are the words "London: Printed anno Dom 1648;" but a copy in the British Museum bears the MS. note "London, 8 January, 1647-8.">[