During the whole time of Milton's residence in Petty France, his elder nephew tells us, "he was frequently visited by persons of quality, particularly my lady Ranelagh (whose son for some time he instructed), all learned foreigners of note (who could not part out of this city without giving a visit to a person so eminent), and lastly by particular friends that had a high esteem for him: viz. Mr. Andrew Marvell, young Lawrence (the son of him that was President of Oliver's Council), ... Mr. Marchamont Needham, the writer of Politicus, but above all Mr. Cyriack Skinner." To these may be added Hartlib, Durie (when he was not abroad), Henry Oldenburg, and others of the Hartlib-Durie connexion. Altogether, the group is an interesting one, and it is precisely in and about 1655 that we have the means of seeing all the individuals of it in closest proximity to Milton and to each other. As one's curiosity is keenest, at this point, about Lady Ranelagh, she may have the precedence.

On her own account she deserves it. We have already seen (ante Vol. III. 658-660) who she was,—by marriage the Viscountess Ranelagh, wife of Arthur Jones, second Viscount Ranelagh in the Irish Peerage, but by birth Catharine Boyle, daughter of the great Richard Boyle, first Earl of Cork, with the four surviving sons of that Earl for her brothers, and his five other surviving daughters for her sisters.—Of her four brothers, the eldest, Richard Boyle, second Earl of Cork, lived generally in Ireland, looking after his great estates there; and indeed it was in Ireland that most of the family had their chief properties. But the second brother, Roger Boyle, Lord Broghhill, already known to us for his services in Ireland under Cromwell, and for his conspicuous fidelity to Cromwell ever since, was now in Scotland, as President of Cromwell's Council there. He may be called the literary brother; for, though his chief activity hitherto had been in war and politics, he had found time to write and publish his long romance or novel called Parthenissa, and so to begin a literary reputation which was to be increased by poems, tragedies, comedies, &c., in no small profusion, in coming years. His age, at our present date, was about thirty-four. Two years younger was Francis Boyle, the third brother, afterwards Lord Shannon, and four years younger still was the philosophical and scientific brother, Mr. Boyle, or "the Honourable Mr. Robert Boyle." When we last saw this extraordinary young man, after his return from his travels, i.e. in 1645-48, he was in retirement at Stalbridge in Dorsetshire, absorbed in studies and in chemical experiments, but corresponding eagerly with Hartlib and others in London, and sometimes coming to town himself, when he would attend those meetings of the Invisible College, the germ of the future Royal Society, about the delights of which Hartlib was never tired of writing to him. This mode of life he had continued, with the interruption of a journey or two abroad, till 1652. "Nor am I here altogether idle," he says in one of his latest letters to Hartlib from Stalbridge; "for I can sometimes make a shift to snatch from the importunity of my affairs leisure to trace such plans, and frame such models, as, if my Irish fortune will afford me quarries and woods to draw competent materials from to construct after them, will fit me to build a pretty house in Athens, where I may live to Philosophy and Mr. Hartlib." The necessity of looking after the Irish fortune of which he here speaks had since then taken him to Ireland and kept him there for the greater part of two years. He found it, he says, "a barbarous country, where chemical spirits were so misunderstood, and chemical instruments so unprocurable, that it was hard to have any Hermetic thoughts in it;" and he had betaken himself to "anatomical dissections" as the only kind of scientific pastime that Irish conditions favoured. On returning to England, in 1654, he had settled in Oxford, to be in the society of Wilkins, Wallis, Goddard, Ward, Petty, Bathurst, Willis, and other kindred scientific spirits, most of them recently transferred from London to posts in the University, and so forming the Oxford offshoot of the Invisible College, as distinct from the London original. But still from Oxford, as formerly from Stalbridge, the young philosopher made occasional visits to London; and always, when there, he was to be found at the house of his sister, Lady Ranelagh.—What property belonged to Lady Ranelagh herself, or to her husband, lay also mainly in Ireland; but for many years, in consequence of the distracted state of that country, her residence had been in London. "In the Pall Mall, in the suburbs of Westminster," is the more exact designation. Her Irish property seems, for the present, to have yielded her but a dubious revenue; and though she had a Government pension of £4 a week on some account or other, she seems to have been dependent in some degree on subsidies from her wealthier relatives. It also appears, though hazily, that there was some deep-rooted disagreement between her and her husband, and that, if he was not generally away in Ireland, he was at least now seldom with her in London. She had her children with her, however. One of these was her only son, styled then simply Mr. Richard Jones, though modern custom would style him Lord Navan. In 1655 he was a boy of fifteen years of age, Lady Ranelagh herself being then just forty. The education of this boy, and of her two or three girls, was her main anxiety; but she took a deep interest as well in the affairs of all the members of the Boyle family, not one of whom would take any step of importance without consulting her. She corresponded with them all, but especially with Lord Broghill and the philosophical young Robert, both of them her juniors, and Robert peculiarly her protegé. In his letters to her, all written carefully and in a strain of stately and respectful affection, we see the most absolute confidence in her judgment; and it is from her letters to him, full of solicitude about his health, and of interest in his experiments and speculations, that we obtain perhaps the best idea of that combination of intellectual and moral excellencies to which her contemporaries felt they could not do justice except by calling her "the incomparable Lady Ranelagh." For that name, which was to be hers through an entire generation more, was already as common in talk about her beyond the circle of her own family as the affectionate one of "Sister Ranelagh" was within that circle. Partly it was because she was one of the best-educated women of her time, with the widest tastes and sympathies in matters literary and philosophical, and with much of that genius of the Boyles, though in feminine form, which was represented by Lord Broghill and Robert Boyle among her brothers. Just before our present date we find her taking lessons in Hebrew from a Scotch teacher of that language then in London, who afterwards dedicated his Gate to the Holy Tongue to her, with much respect for her "proficiency in so short a time," and "amidst so many abstractions as she was surrounded with." And so in things of greater grasp. In writing to her brother Robert her satisfaction with the new Experimental Philosophy which he and others are trying to institute can express itself as a belief that it will "help the considering part of mankind to a clearer prospect into this great frame of the visible world, and therein of the power and wisdom of its great Maker, than the rough draft wherein it has hitherto been represented in the ignorant and wholesale philosophy that has so long, by the power of an implicit faith in the doctrine of Aristotle and the Schools, gone current in the world has ever been able to assist them towards." But it was not merely by variety of intellectual culture that Lady Ranelagh was distinguished. One cannot read her letters without discerning in them a deep foundation of piety in the best sense, real wisdom, a serious determination with herself to make her own life as actively useful as possible, and a disposition always to relate herself to what was sterling around her. "Though some particular opinions might shut her up in a divided communion," said Burnet of her long afterwards, "yet her soul was never of a party. She divided her charities and friendships, her esteem as well as her bounty, with the truest regard to merit and her own obligations, without any difference made upon the account of opinion." This was true even at our present date, when she was an Oliverian in politics, like her brother Broghill, though perhaps more moderately so, and in religious matters what may be called a very liberal Puritan.1

1: Birch's Life of Robert Boyle, prefixed to edition of Boyle's Works, pp. 27-33; Letters of Boyle to Lady Ranelagh and of Lady Ranelagh to Boyle in Vol. V. of his Works; Notes by Mr. Crossley to his edition of Worthington's Diary and Correspondence for the Chetham Society, I. p. 164-165, and 366. Mrs. Green's Calendar of State-Papers for 1651, p. 574.

How long Lady Ranelagh had known Milton is uncertain; but, as her nephew, the young Earl of Barrimore, had been one of Milton's pupils in his house in the Barbican, and as we had express information that he had been sent there by his aunt, the acquaintance must have begun as early as 1646 or 1647. And now, it appears, through all the intermediate eight years of Milton's changes of residence and fortune, including his six in the Latin Secretaryship, the acquaintanceship has been kept up, and has been growing more intimate, till, in 1655, in his widowerhood and blindness in his house in Petty France, there is no one, and certainly no lady, that more frequently calls upon him, or whose voice, on the staircase, announcing who the visitor is, he is more pleased to hear. They were close neighbours, only St. James's Park between their houses; and his having taught her nephew, the young Earl of Barrimore, was not now the only link of that kind between themselves. She had not been satisfied till she had contrived that her own son should, to some extent, be Milton's pupil too. "My Lady Ranelagh, whose son for some time he instructed" are Phillips's words on this point; and, though we included Lady Ranelagh's son, Mr. Richard Jones, afterwards third Viscount and first Earl of Ranelagh, in our general enumeration of Milton's pupils, given under the year 1647, when the Barbican establishment was complete, it was with the intimation that this particular pupil, then but seven years old, could hardly have been one of the Barbican boys, but must have had the benefit of lessons from Milton in some exceptional way afterwards. The fact, on the likeliest construction of the evidence, seems to have been that Milton, to oblige Lady Ranelagh, had quite recently allowed the boy to come daily, or every other day, from his mother's house in Pall Mall to Petty France, to sit with him for an hour or two, and read Greek and Latin. To the end of his life Milton found this easy kind of pedagogy a pleasant amusement in his blindness, and made it indeed one of his devices for help to himself in his readings and references to books; and Lady Ranelagh's son may have been his first experiment in the method. That he retained an interest in this young Ranelagh of a semi-tutorial kind, as well as on his mother's account, the sequel will prove.

Strange things do happen in real life; and actually it was possible that, on the day of one of Lady Ranelagh's visits to Milton, she might have had a call in her own house from Dr. Peter Du Moulin. For her ladyship's circle of acquaintance did include this gentleman. He had been tutor in Ireland to her two nephews, Viscount Dungarvan and Mr. Richard Boyle, sons of her eldest brother, the Earl of Cork, and he had come with them, still in that capacity, to Oxford (ante p. 224), and so had been introduced into the whole Boyle connexion.1 What amount of awkwardness there may have been in a possible meeting between Du Moulin and Milton themselves through this common social connexion of theirs in London has been already discussed. The Ranelagh circle, for the rest, included all those, or most of them, that were Milton's friends independently, and could converse about him in her ladyship's own spirit. The family of Lord President Lawrence, for example, were in high esteem with Lady Ranelagh; and the President's son, Mr. Henry Lawrence, Milton's young friend, and presumably one of his former pupils of the Barbican days, seems to have been about this time much in the company of her ladyship's nephew, the Earl of Barrimore. That young nobleman, we may mention, had become a married man, shortly after he had ceased to be Milton's pupil in the Barbican, and was now leading a gallant and rather idle life about London, but not quite astray from his aunt's society, or perhaps from Milton's either.2 Then there were Hartlib, Durie, Haak, and other lights of the London branch of the Invisible College, friends of Robert Boyle for years past, and corresponding with him and the other luminaries of the Oxford colony of the College. Hartlib, in particular, who now lived at Charing Gross, and who had found a new theme of interest in the wonderful abilities and wonderful experiments of Mr. Clodius, a German chemist, who had recently become his son-in-law, was still in constant correspondence with Boyle, and was often at Lady Ranelagh's on some occasion or other.3 Nor must Milton's new German friend, Henry Oldenburg, the agent for Bremen, be forgotten. He also, as we shall find, had been drawn, in a special manner, into the Boyle and Ranelagh connexion, and was, in fact, entering, by means of this connexion, on that part of his interesting career for which he is remembered in the annals of English science. He was to marry Durie's only daughter, and be retained by that tie, as well as by others, in the Hartlib-Durie cluster of Milton's friends.

1: Dr. Peter Du Moulin was one of Robert Boyle's friends and correspondents both before and after the Restoration. It was at Boyle's request that Du Moulin translated and published in 1658 a little book called The Devil of Mascon, a French story of well-authenticated spirit-rapping; and the book was dedicated by Dumoulin to Boyle, and Boyle contributed an introductory letter to it. Moreover, it was to Boyle that Du Moulin in 1670 dedicated the first part of his Parerga or Collection of Latin Poems, the second part of which contained his reprint of the Iambics against Milton from the Regii Sanguinis Clamor.—See Birch's Life of Boyle, p. 60, and four letters of Du Moulin to Boyle in Boyle's Works, Vol. V (pp 594-596). In three of these letters, all written after the Restoration, Du Moulin presents his respectful services to "My Honourable Lady Ranelagh" in terms implying long-established acquaintanceship. But there are other scattered proofs of Du Moulin's long intimacy with the whole Boyle family.

2: The young Earl had married, hastily and against his mother's will, in 1649, shortly after he had been Milton's pupil. See a letter of condolence on the subject from Robert Boyle to his sister, the young Earl's mother (Boyle's Works, V. 240). For the intimacy between the young Earl of Barrimore and young Henry Lawrence see a letter of Hartlib's to Boyle. (Ibid. V. 279).

3: Letters of Hartlib to Boyle in Vol. V. of Boyle's Works.

Marvell, Needham, and Cyriack Skinner are not certainly known to have been among Lady Ranelagh's acquaintances. Their visits to Milton, therefore, have to be imagined apart. Marvell's, if he were still domiciled at Eton, can have been but occasional, but must have been always welcome. Needham's cannot have been, as formerly, on business connected with the Mercurius Politicus; for Milton had ceased for some years to have anything to do with the editorship of that journal. The duty of licensing it and its weekly double, The Public Intelligencer, also edited by Needham and published by Newcome, was now performed regularly by the omnipotent Thurloe. Both journals would come to Milton's house, to be read to him; and Needham, in his visits, would bring other gossip of the town, and be altogether a very chatty companion. "Above all, Mr. Cyriack Skinner" is, however, Phillips's phrase in his enumeration of those of his uncle's friends who were most frequently with him about this time. The words imply that, since June 1654, when this old pupil of Milton's had again "got near" him (Vol. IV. pp. 621-623), his attention to Milton had been unremitting, so that Milton had come to depend upon it and to expect him almost daily. On that understanding it is that we may read most luminously four private Sonnets of Milton, all of the year 1655, two of them addressed to Cyriack Skinner, and one to young Lawrence. The remaining sonnet, standing first of the four in the printed editions, is addressed to no one in particular; but the four will be read best in connexion. In reading them Cyriack Skinner is to be pictured as about twenty-eight years of age, and Lawrence as a youth of two and twenty:—

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