Collins informs James Gregory that "some of the Royal Academy wrote over to Mr. Oldenburg, who was desired to impart the same to the Council of the Royal Society, that the French King was willing to allow pensions to one or two learned Englishmen, but they never made any answer
to such a proposal." This was written in 1671, and the thing probably happened several years before. Mr. De Morgan communicated the account of the proposal to Lord Macaulay, who replied that he did not think that any Englishman received a literary pension from Louis; but that there is a curious letter, about 1664, from the French Ambassador, in which he says that he has, by his master's orders, been making inquiries as to the state of learning in England, and that he is sorry to find that the best writer is the infamous Miltonus. On two such independent testimonies it may be held proved that the French King had attempted to buy a little adherence from English literature and science; and the silent contempt of the Royal Society is an honorable fact in their history.
Another little bit of politics is as follows. Oughtred is informed that "Mr. Foster,[[570]] our Lecturer on Astronomy at Gresham College, is put out because he will not kneel down at the communion-table. A Scotsman [Mungo Murray], one that is verbi bis minister,[[571]] is now lecturer in Mr. Foster's place." Ward in his work on the Gresham Professors,[[572]] suppresses the reason, and the suppression lowers the character of his book. Foster was expelled in 1636, and re-elected on a vacancy in 1641, when Puritanism had gained strength.
The correspondence of Newton would require deeper sifting than could be given in such an article as the present. The first of the letters (1669) is curious, as presenting the
appearance of forms belonging to the great calculus which, in this paragraph, we ought to call that of fluxions. We find, of the date February 18, 1669-70, what we believe is the earliest manifestation of that morbid part of Newton's temperament which has been so variously represented. He had solved a problem—being that which we have called Dary's—on which he writes as follows: "The solution of the annuity problem, if it will be of any use, you have my leave to insert into the Philosophical Transactions, so it be without my name to it. For I see not what there is desirable in public esteem, were I able to acquire and maintain it. It would perhaps increase my acquaintance, the thing which I chiefly study to decline."
Three letters touch upon "the experiment of glass rubbed to cause various motions in bits of paper underneath": they are supplements to the account given by Newton to the Royal Society, and printed by Birch. It was Newton, so far as appears, who added glass to the substances known to be electric. Soon afterwards we come to a little bit of the history of the appointment to the Mint. It has appeared from the researches of late years that Newton was long an aspirant for public employment: the only coolness which is known to have taken place between him and Charles Montague[[573]] [Halifax] arose out of his imagining that his friend was not in earnest about getting him into the public service. March 14, 1696, Newton writes thus to Halley: "And if the rumour of preferment for me in the Mint should hereafter, upon the death of Mr. Hoar [the comptroller], or any other occasion, be revived, I pray that you would
endeavour to obviate it by acquainting your friends that I neither put in for any place in the Mint, nor would meddle with Mr. Hoar's place, were it offered to me." This means that Mr. Hoar's place had been suggested, which Newton seems to have declined. Five days afterwards, Montague writes to Newton that he is to have the Wardenship. It is fair to Newton to say that in all probability this was not—or only in a smaller degree—a question of personal dignity, or of salary. It must by this time have been clear to him that the minister, though long bound to make him an object of patronage, was actually seeking him for the Mint, because he wanted both Newton's name and his talents for business—which he knew to be great—in the weighty and dangerous operation of restoring the coinage. It may have been, and probably was, the case that Newton had a tolerably accurate notion of what he would have to do, and of what degree of power would be necessary to enable him to do it in his own way.
We have said that the non-epistolary manuscripts are still unexamined. There is a chance that one of them may answer a question of two centuries' standing, which is worth answering, because it has been so often asked. About 1640, Warner,[[574]] afterwards assisted by Pell,[[575]] commenced a table of antilogarithms, of the kind which Dodson[[576]] afterwards constructed anew and published. In the Museum collection there is inquiry after inquiry from Charles Cavendish,[[577]] first, as to when the Analogics, as he called them, would be finished; next, when they would be printed. Pell answers, in 1644, that Warner left his papers to a kinsman, who had become bankrupt, and proceeds thus:
"I am not a little afraid that all Mr. Warner's papers,
and no small share of my labours therein, are seazed upon, and most unmathematically divided between the sequestrators and creditors, who (not being able to ballance the account where there appeare so many numbers, and much troubled at the sight of so many crosses and circles in the superstitious Algebra and that black art of Geometry) will, no doubt, determine once in their lives to become figure-casters, and so vote them all to be throwen into the fire, if some good body doe not reprieve them for pye-bottoms, for which purposes you know analogicall numbers are incomparably apt, if they be accurately calculated."