The wealthy banker, Cliffort, first among amateur botanists of his day, invited Linnæus to visit him at his country-house at Hartecamp. Here he saw the finest garden he had ever looked upon. Cliffort had copies of Linnæus' book and he now insisted that the author should remain, catalog his collection and issue the book with the help of the Plantins, all without regard to cost. It took a year to get the work out, but it yet remains one of the finest things ever attempted in a bookmaking way on the subject of botany.
About the same time, with the help of Cliffort, Linnæus published another big book of his own called, "Fundamenta Botanica." This book was taken up at Oxford and used as a textbook, in preference to Ray.
Linnæus received invitations from England and was persuaded to take a trip across to that country. He visited Oxford and London, and was received by scientific men as a conquering hero. He saw Garrick act and heard George Frederick Handel, where the crowd was so great that a notice was posted requesting gentlemen to come without swords and ladies without hoops. Handel composed an aria in his honor.
Returning to Leyden, Linnæus was urged by the municipality to remain and rearrange the public flower-gardens and catalog the rare plants at the University. This took a year, in which three more books were issued under his skilful care.
He now started for home in earnest, by way of Paris, with what a contemporary calls "a trunkful of medals."
Paris, too, had honors and employment for the great botanist, but he escaped and at last reached Fahlun. He had been gone nearly four years, and during the interval had established his place in the scientific world as the first botanist of the time.
"It was love that sent me out of Sweden, and but for love I would never have returned," he wrote.
Linnæus and Sara Elizabeth were married June Twenty-six, Seventeen Hundred Thirty-nine.
Now the unexpected happened: Upsala petitioned Linnæus to return, and the man who headed the petition was the one who had driven him away and who came near being killed for his pains. Linnæus and his wife went to Upsala, rich, honored, beloved.
Linnæus shifted the scientific center of gravity of all Europe to a town, practically to them obscure, a thing they themselves scarcely realized.