His early letters to Robert Boyle at Stalbridge are full of the subjects under discussion. And there is no doubt that it was to a great extent the fascination of these weekly meetings in Wood Street, and the company he met there, that drew Robert Boyle so often to London and kept him in London as long as he could manage to stay there.
“I have been every day these two months,” he wrote to his friend Francis Tallents, in February 1647,[145] “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 a way out on’t ... the best on’t is, that the corner-stones of the invisible, or as they term themselves, the philosophical college, do now and then honour me with their company ... 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 tractable a genius, as they disdain not to be directed to the meanest, so he can but plead reason for his opinion; persons that endeavour to put narrow-mindedness out of countenance by the practice of so extensive a charity that it reaches unto everything called man, and nothing less than a universal goodwill can content it. And indeed they are so apprehensive of the want of good employment, that they take the whole body of mankind for their care.”
And he concludes his panegyric 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 London outside this pleasant coterie was not so congenial to Robert Boyle. Above all, the sects and sectaries were his abomination. They were coming over from Amsterdam like so many bills of exchange; they were like “diurnals,” eagerly read, and then in a day or two torn up as not worth keeping. They were “mushrooms of last night’s coming up.” “If any man have lost his religion,” he wrote, “let him repair to London, and I’ll warrant him he shall find it: I had almost said too, and if any man has a religion, let him but come hither now, and he shall go near to lose it.... For my part, I shall always pray God to give us the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace....”[146]
One immediate outcome of these club meetings in Wood Street was a little scheme, evidently aided and abetted by Lady Ranelagh, which filled all Robyn’s thoughts on his return to Stalbridge in the spring of 1647. He was going to set up a laboratory of his own, in the empty manor-house. It was a scheme not easy to carry out in those days; and his first efforts were to result in dire failure. “That great earthen furnace,” he wrote to Lady Ranelagh, “whose conveying hither has taken up so much of my care, and concerning which I made bold very lately to trouble you, since I last did so, has been brought to my hands crumbled into as many pieces as we into sects; and all the fine experiments and castles in the air I had built upon its safe arrival have felt the fate of its foundation. Well, I see I am not designed to the finding out the philosopher’s stone, I have been so unlucky in my first attempts at chemistry. My limbecks, recipients, and other glasses have escaped indeed the misfortune of their incendiary, but are now, through the miscarriage of that grand implement of Vulcan, as useless to me as good parts to salvation without the fire of zeal. Seriously, Madam, after all the pains I have taken, and the precautions I have used, to prevent this furnace the disasters of its predecessors, to have it transported a thousand miles by land that I may after all this receive it broken, is a defeat that nothing could recompense, but that rare lesson it teaches me, how brittle that happiness is that we build upon earth.”[147]
These words breathe the first hint of a melancholy in Robert Boyle’s life, the causes of which—though he did his best to conceal and conquer them—are not far to seek.
As early as 1646, when he was not yet twenty, there comes into his letters the note of physical suffering. Like many scholars and thinkers, Robert Boyle was very sensitive about physical pain, and the chances of infection and disease. As a boy at Eton, it will be remembered, the “potion” held more than ordinary terrors for the spiritay Robyn. Perhaps he had heard about little Hodge, who had died at Deptford, after so dutifully swallowing the powder of unicorns’ horns. But even if not, he must have seen the same thing happening all about him; he must have known well enough that medical treatment in his day was steeped in the optimism of blackest ignorance. The plasters and powders and potions and purges with which the Faculty “wrought” so boldly on every disease, and the weird and melodramatic endings which were their usual results, had given Robyn “a perfect aversion to all physick.” He believed that, in most cases, it “did but exasperate the disease.” Had not he seen “life itself almost disgorged together with a potion”? It was his own childish experiences that inclined this experimentalist, all his life, to “apprehend more from the physician than the disease,” and set him to apply himself to the study of physic “that he might have the less need of them that profess it.” And so, though he was to count among his friends of the Philosophical College and elsewhere the most learned and eminent physicians of his time, and as he grew older came to trusting very humbly and gratefully to the skill of more than one of them, Robert Boyle’s tendency, all through life, was to simplify medical treatment, and as far as possible to doctor himself with the aid of an intelligent and obedient “apothecary.”
If he had known that he was to live till he was sixty-five, and that the five-and-forty years that lay before him were to be years of more or less invalidism and suffering! But the long future was veiled; at twenty, the months in front of him were all-important. And he must have known as early as 1646 that his attacks of pain and “ague fits” were caused by the existence of renal calculus—the “gravel of the kidneys” of his day. He knew of it when he wrote the letter to Hartlib (a fellow sufferer) in which he gratefully thanks good Mrs. Hartlib for a “receipt” or “sanative remedy,” which she had sent him in one of her husband’s letters, against a disease that Robyn calls “so cruel in its tortures and so fatal in its catastrophe.”[148]
Stalbridge, with this fact realised, was no longer the home of glad possibilities it may at first have promised to be; which the old Earl, in leaving it to his Benjamin, had certainly intended it to be. But Robert Boyle was making the best of it. “As for me,” he wrote to Hartlib—“during my confinement to this melancholy solitude, I often divert myself at leisure moments in trying such experiments as the unfurnishedness of the place and the present distractedness of my mind will permit me.” Friends and neighbours came about him; these were certain “young knights” and young Churchmen and “travellers out of France,” who appear under fancy names in his Reflections: Eusebius, “a Dr. of Divinity,” Eugenius and Genorio, “Travellers and fine Gentlemen,” and Lindamor, “a learned youth, both well born and well bred.” If they were not actually his guests at Stalbridge, Robyn “took pleasure to imagine” them to “be present with me at the occasion”; and poetic licence has suggested that Lindamor may have been Robyn himself, in some of his moods, though he still figures in some of them as Philaretus and speaks in others of them of “Mr. Boyle”—even while he is using also the first personal pronoun. The Earl of Bristol’s family at Sherborne Castle were pleasant neighbours, and the family of Sir Thomas Mallet, at Poynington—Sir Thomas and his Lady, and Mr. John Mallet their son, and the young lady whom John Mallet was to marry—“the fair young lady you are happy in,” as Robert Boyle called her.
Robyn’s own family—scattered and busy as they were—came to see him sometimes. He says himself that his sister, Lady Ranelagh, was “almost always with him during his sickness”;[149] and his brother Frank seems to have been a welcome and cheerful guest at Stalbridge; while Robyn himself rode over now and then to Marston Bigot, when “dear Broghill” and Lady Pegg were there. But his laboratory and his “standish” and books, and especially his correspondence with Hartlib in London, were a great resource. It was at this time that he was writing the little essays he spoke of to Marcombes. Among them was his Free Discourse against Customary Swearing, which in manuscript pleased his relations, and was dedicated to his sister Kildare.[150] And it was then also that he was writing his Occasional Reflections upon Several Subjects, which so delighted Lady Ranelagh.[151] They afford many glimpses into Robert Boyle’s life during the years spent at Stalbridge. He is to be seen in them as the young Squire of gentle, studious tastes and simple habits, sitting, book in hand, over the slow-burning wood fire in the parlour with the carved stone chimney-piece “fair and graceful in all respects”; or riding his horse along the up-and-down-hill Dorset lanes; angling by the side of a stream, or walking in his own meadows, with his spaniel at his heels: philosophising as he goes; observing all things always; dreaming, perhaps, a little too—within bounds. The very titles of his Reflections are an epitome of the life of those Stalbridge days. The spaniel is a constant companion, in weal and woe:—