Every memorial of so great a man as Sir Isaac Newton has been preserved and cherished with peculiar veneration. His house at Woolsthorpe, of which we have given an engraving, has been religiously protected by Mr. Turnor of Stoke Rocheford, the proprietor. Dr. Stukeley, who visited it in Sir Isaac’s lifetime, on the 13th October, 1721, gives the following description of it in his letter to Dr. Mead, written in 1727: “’Tis built of stone as is the way of the country hereabouts, and a reasonable good one. They led me up stairs and showed me Sir Isaac’s study, where I suppose he studied when in the country in his younger days, or perhaps when he visited his mother from the university. I observed the shelves were of his own making, being pieces of deal boxes which probably he sent his books and clothes down in on those occasions. There were some years ago two or three hundred books in it of his father-in-law, Mr. Smith, which Sir Isaac gave to Dr. Newton of our town.”[134]
When the house was repaired in 1798, a tablet of white marble was put up by Mr. Turnor in the room where Sir Isaac was born, with the following inscription:
“Sir Isaac Newton, son of John Newton, Lord of the manor of Woolsthorpe, was born in this room on the 25th December, 1642.”
Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night,
God said, “Let Newton be,” and all was light.
The following lines have been written upon the house:
Here Newton dawned, here lofty wisdom woke,
And to a wondering world divinely spoke.
If Tully glowed, when Phædrus’ steps he trode,
Or fancy formed Philosophy a god;
If sages still for Homer’s birth contend
The Sons of Science at this dome must bend.
All hail the shrine! All hail the natal day,
Cam boasts his noon,—This Cot his morning ray.
The house is now occupied by a person of the name of John Wollerton. It still contains the two dials made by Newton, but the styles of both are wanting. The celebrated apple-tree, the fall of one of the apples of which is said to have turned the attention of Newton to the subject of gravity, was destroyed by wind about four years ago; but Mr. Turnor has preserved it in the form of a chair.[135]
The chambers which Sir Isaac inhabited at Cambridge are known by tradition. They are the apartments next to the great gate of Trinity College, and it is believed that they then communicated by a staircase with the observatory in the Great Tower,—an observatory which was furnished by the contributions of Newton, Cotes, and others. His telescope, represented in [fig. 3], page 41, is preserved in the library of the Royal Society of London, and his globe, his universal ring-dial, quadrant, compass, and a reflecting telescope said to have belonged to him, in the library of Trinity College. There is also in the same collection a long and curled lock of his silver white hair. The door of his bookcase is in the Museum of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.
The manuscripts, letters, and other papers of Newton have been preserved in different collections. His correspondence with Cotes relative to the second edition of the Principia, and amounting to between sixty and a hundred letters, a considerable portion of the manuscript of that work, and two or three letters to Dr. Keill on the Leibnitzian controversy, are preserved in the library of Trinity College, Cambridge. Newton’s letters to Flamstead, about thirty-four in number, are deposited in the library of Corpus Christi College, Oxford.[136] Several letters of Newton, and, we believe, the original specimen which he drew up of the Principia, exist among the papers of Mr. William Jones (the father of Sir William Jones), which are preserved at Shirburn Castle, in the library of Lord Macclesfield. But the great mass of Newton’s papers came into the possession of the Portsmouth family through his niece, Lady Lymington, and have been safely preserved by that noble family. There is reason to believe that they contain nothing which could be peculiarly interesting to science; but as the correspondence of Newton with contemporary philosophers must throw considerable light on his personal history, we trust that it will ere long be given to the public.