In the summer of 1664, Boyle had been suffering with his eyes; and on his journey to the west—he was apparently that summer at Stalbridge and Marston Bigot—he stayed at Salisbury, to consult his friend and oculist, Dr. Turberville.[286]
That autumn, State affairs were almost of more interest at the moment than the transactions of the Society; and war-gossip and Court-gossip occupied a considerable portion of Oldenburg’s letters to Boyle. Hooke, the Curator, wrote also, but his letters were of “the conjunction of Mercury and Sol.” Boyle was back in Oxford in October; and on October 24, when Evelyn paid a visit to Oxford, he found Boyle “with Dr. Wallis and Dr. Christopher Wren in the Tower of the Scholes with an inverted tube or telescope, observing the discus of the Sunn for the passing of Mercury that day before it; but the latitude was so great that nothing appeared.” The little party, disappointed, went on to the Bodleian, and to look at the Sheldonian, then building by the generosity of the Archbishop, and the great picture with too many “nakeds” in it, over the Altar in the chapel of All Souls.[287]
Boyle was still in Oxford in November, when the Duke of York and “many gallants” were going off to join the Fleet; and in December, when the “mighty vote” of £2,500,000 was passed, that Charles II might “be possessed of the dominion at sea, and the disposal of Trade.”[288] Everybody in London was feeling very rich and belligerent—the exact methods by which the money was to be raised not having been yet decided upon. That same November, Oldenburg was begging for Boyle’s communications to the Society on the History of Cold. They would come, as he said, very seasonably, “Our Society having already, by the late Frost, excited one another to the prosecution of experiments of freezing.” The frost lasted long enough to please the little London boys and the Philosophers alike. January came in, with “excessive sharp frost and snow.”[289] The London streets were full of snowballs on January 2, when Mr. Pepys dined in the Piazza, Covent Garden, with my Lord Brouncker—who was a great many other things besides President of the Royal Society,—and occasioned such mirth by reading aloud to the company the “ballet” lately made “by the men at sea to the ladies in town.” Who does not remember Buckhurst’s—
“To all ye ladies now on land
We men at sea indite;
But first would have you understand
How hard it is to write.
The Muses now, and Neptune too,
We must implore to write to you,
With a fa la la la la!”